Every month, 702,000 healthcare jobs go unfilled. Only 306,000 qualified workers exist to fill them. That gap—and what it takes to close it—was at the center of a conversation featuring Covista executives at the 2026 Punchbowl News Conference in Washington, D.C.

On March 10, Punchbowl News Managing Editor Heather Caygle sat down with Chief Corporate Affairs Officer Megan Noel and Chief Digital Officer and Walden University President Michael Betz at Union Station to discuss America's healthcare workforce crisis and the role Covista is playing as the nation's largest healthcare educator.

The session came on the heels of remarks from Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) on rural hospital closures and Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA) on AI's cross-sector potential—grounding the conversation in Washington's current debate over both issues.

What followed was a conversation covering the scale of the crisis, why traditional education isn't built to solve it and how AI, employer partnerships and institutions willing to operate differently can begin to change the math.

Q&A: Megan Noel & Michael Betz with Heather Caygle

Responses have been lightly edited and condensed from live remarks.

It Takes Everyone

Caygle: What were your takeaways from the conversation with Congressman Beyer?

Noel: I loved that he said it is going to take a variety of parties working together in new ways—and that reflects exactly how we think about this at Covista. It's a cross-sector approach.

Betz: In our case as a healthcare educator, that means helping train a new generation of healthcare workers who can work in concert with these new tools to help address the shortages we're facing. We're also seeing an enormous impact from using AI to tutor and support our students—further democratizing education. We're quite optimistic about what the potential is.

The Scope of The Crisis

Caygle: Zooming out, what is critical for our audience to understand about the healthcare workforce shortage—and what role is Covista playing in addressing it?

Noel: Covista is America's largest healthcare educator. We have five accredited universities: American University of the Caribbean School of Medicine, Ross University School of Medicine, Ross University School of Veterinary Medicine, Chamberlain University and Walden University. Together, those universities educate more than 97,000 students and we graduate 24,000 every year—approximately 90% of them in healthcare. Doctors, nurses, behavioral health specialists, mental health specialists.

Every month there are 702,000 jobs posted in healthcare and only 306,000 people qualified to fill them. Today we have a shortage of 8.4 million healthcare workers—and it's only getting worse. Traditional universities do an excellent job educating nurses and doctors, but they are not doing it at scale. We're taking a systemically different approach bringing doctors and nurses into the system, especially in rural and underserved areas where they are needed most.

What Health Systems Are Asking For

Caygle: Michael, you lead AI strategy at Covista. When it comes to healthcare employers, what do you hear most about the skills they're looking for in graduates?

Betz: First, the overwhelming majority of healthcare executives see AI as part of the solution—it can increase productivity and offload administrative tasks that nurses, doctors and others are burdened with today. But the single biggest blocker right now is human capital. Organizations need people who are fluent in these tools, can use them responsibly and ethically and can help lead change in their healthcare systems.

What we're committed to is integrating into our curriculum exactly what we're hearing from our healthcare partners—whether it's ambient documentation, new diagnostic tools or streamlining administrative tasks. When our graduates leave our institutions, they're supported in their transition to clinical practice environments.  But they're also prepared to lead positive change in applying technology in whatever setting they're working in.

AI Won't Take the Job. It'll Change It.

Caygle: Do you feel like the healthcare industry has been able to keep up with how fast this technology is changing?

Noel: Congressman Beyer was asked whether he thought AI was going to take his job. What we're seeing and hearing from the data—and in a practical sense in healthcare—is that it won't. It's going to complement the work. It's going to give clinicians more time doing what they want to do: spending time with patients and less time on administrative tasks. In our view, this is an opportunity to get more doctors and nurses into the system and redirect their time to where they're needed most, with patients.

Implementing AI at Scale

Caygle: Michael, how do you implement these offerings effectively?

Betz: We benefit from these advances in two ways—as an educator using AI to support our students, and in preparing them for the workplace. On the latter, we knew from the outset that we couldn't do it alone. So we've partnered with Google, GE Healthcare and startups in the AI space to bring together what we know best—how to educate people—with what they know around technology.

We also created an AI Advisory Board in healthcare education, where leaders from health systems tell us exactly the skills they need. The advantage we have as a teaching institution at scale is that we can update our curriculum and deploy it across tens of thousands of students in a way that many other institutions would be challenged to do.

Noel: We recently conducted research with Gallup—the Covista Care Capacity Monitor—and one of the things we asked healthcare executives and clinicians about was AI. What came back clearly is that executives want practice-ready graduates who can hit the ground running, and AI fluency is part of that. Clinicians want that training too. There's an appetite on both sides. And when students build these skills during their education, it becomes part of their professional vernacular—so when they become clinicians, they're ready on day one.

What a Real Solution Looks Like

Caygle: What kind of impact are you seeing from your programs in making a dent in this workforce shortage?

Noel: Our size and scale create an opportunity to do things differently—in ways no one else can. We've built relationships with health systems and brokered partnerships designed to solve their talent shortage in a fundamentally different way.

A strong example is our relationship with SSM Health, a large Catholic, not-for-profit health system operating in Wisconsin, Illinois, Missouri and Oklahoma—states with an acute need for nurses. Through Chamberlain University—the largest nursing school in the country—we launched the Aspiring Nurse Program. SSM Health helps fund students' education in exchange for a service commitment upon graduation, creating a direct pipeline of talent into their system. Students know the culture, they know the system, and they hit the ground running. And they go into Chamberlain knowing there's a job at the end of it. That's the kind of structural solution that our scale makes possible.

Where Washington Gets It Right

Caygle: Do you feel like lawmakers understand the healthcare shortage and how AI can help or do you find yourselves having to educate members more than you'd like?

Betz: I loved what Congressman Beyer said about the idea of experimentation—having laboratories to try new things. We're already out there doing that, in both education and healthcare. We're seeing today the impact that AI tools built into our curriculum are having in supporting students who are most at risk and opening access to education for a far broader pool of people. What we're hoping is that as we learn from this, those lessons will shape policy.

Noel: One of the great things about the healthcare workforce shortage is that it is not a partisan issue. Everybody wants more doctors, more nurses and more mental health professionals in their communities. Everybody wants to schedule a doctor appointment and not wait nine or twelve months to get in. In our conversations on Capitol Hill, there's receptivity on both sides of the aisle—and we know how rare that is in Washington.

Closing Takeaways

Caygle: What is your biggest takeaway for our audience?

Betz: We see AI as an opportunity to revolutionize both healthcare and education in a very positive way. But it's about supplementing our people. We can't do anything if we can't attract more people to the healthcare workforce, support them when they get there and give them the skills to lead change in their communities once they graduate.

Noel: Two things. First, we must stop thinking about the healthcare workforce shortage as a short-term labor supply issue and start treating it as the structural challenge it is—one that requires a radically different approach. And we need all parties working together—companies, educators, policymakers, health systems—all in on this problem, tackling it together.

Watch the full fireside chat.

Explore workforce shortage data by state at the Covista Care Capacity Monitor.