Broadcasting from the New York Stock Exchange, CEO Steve Beard joins the show to discuss his company’s recent rebrand, new ticker symbol, and ambitious growth strategy unveiled during its investor day. He outlines plans to expand enrollment from 94,000 to 120,000 students over the next three years to help address the nationwide healthcare workforce shortage, while also strengthening direct pipelines between graduates and employers. Beard explains that partnerships with leading technology players such as Google, Hippocratic AI, and GE Healthcare are designed to ensure graduates are fully prepared for an AI-enabled healthcare system. Headquartered in Chicago, the company positions itself as the largest healthcare educator in the United States, producing a significant share of the nation’s nurses and veterinarians, and aims to drive long-term profitability through program expansion, increased enrolment, and deeper employer partnerships that could reshape healthcare talent pipelines.
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I'm pleased now to be joined by the man that you saw on the closing bell podium, Steve Beard, CEO of Costa.
Steve, welcome and welcome to the stock exchange.
In fact, thank you, thank you for having me.
It's a pleasure, of course, here to celebrate your investor day, a rebrand recently to Costa as well.
What does it mean to do this at the NYSC?
Well, we've been traded on the exchange for a long, long time.
It's the perfect place to celebrate the new name and new ticker symbol.
And the perfect place to culminate our investor day where we announced a new growth strategy.
Talk to me about that growth strategy, how the company is going to evolve from here.
Yes, so we're already the largest healthcare educator in the United States, but our goal is to become even bigger.
There's a chronic workforce shortage in healthcare, and we think we're well positioned to address that at scale.
So we've committed to going from 94,000 students to 120,000 students over the next three years while delivering the kind of profitable growth that our shareholders deserve.
How does your purpose at scale strategy solve the shortages that we really see across the country.
Yeah, two important ways.
First, it's just by scale providing more access to students who want to pursue these careers at a scale that no one else can.
And second, it's by partnering with employers.
We're going to do more to bring proprietary pipelines of clinical talent into hospitals and other provider settings.
That too is an exciting part of the strategy.
How do you ensure that your graduates are prepared for an AI-enabled healthcare system one day?
Yes, so we're actively partnering with technology giants like Google, like Hippocratic AI.
GE Healthcare to ensure that our graduates are AI fluent and prepared to use the tools that are going to be leveraged in the care environment and I see here just revealing an aggressive 3 year target of course through 2029 you talked about the growth strategy that you outlaid there.
What are some of the primary drivers that you feel are going to set the company up for long term profitability?
Yes, so it's about bringing new market responsive programs to market.
It's about increasing the enrollments of the institutions we take to market today, and it's about getting.
Employers involved in bringing more students to these professions.
Are your contracted workforce pipelines directly with health systems that the future we'll see how that funding kind of sorts itself out?
Yes, so we're piloting models where employers can actually be a part of the payer mix, get service commitments from the students, and get a stickier relationship with those clinicians as they come into their systems.
We think it's a way to introduce a new talent acquisition model for healthcare providers.
What else do our viewers need to know about Covista?
Again, based in Chicago, largest healthcare educator in the world, number one producer of nurses, 9% of all nurses in the United States, 9% of all veterinarians in the United States, and more physicians than any MV school elsewhere in the US.
It's a, it's a fantastic platform.
Just getting started.
Just getting started.
Just long way to go.
Steve Beard, great to have you in, and you made it in despite what's been a historic blizzard here earlier this week in NYC.
Steve Beard is the CEO of Covista.
Congratulations.
Thank you so much.
Yep.