Recruiting, retaining, and engaging physicians has been a perennial challenge for healthcare organizations. Unfortunately, two new realities over the past 5 to 10 years have made this challenge even more pressing.
Reality No. 1: The shortage of physicians continues to worsen year over year.(1)
Reality No. 2: Today’s generation of physicians doesn’t want to spend their lives at the hospital.
Healthcare leaders have a double deficit on their hands: fewer and fewer physicians and physicians spending fewer and fewer discretionary hours at work.
Healthcare organizations must have a winning strategy to optimize the employee experience of physicians to attract and retain top talent. At the same time, those efforts must also balance the needs of patients and the organization.
Amplified by COVID-19, the double deficit noted above, and increased financial and performance pressures, the physician’s role is too overloaded. For example, the average primary care doctor with a panel size of 2,500 patients would need to spend more than 24 hours per day just meeting all expected care needs. It is no wonder physicians report high levels of job dissatisfaction and burnout and lower levels of retention. Studies and survey data for more than a decade show high levels of physician burnout.(2) As a result, the entire healthcare ecosystem suffers, including the quality of care(3) and patient access.(4)
TWO APPROACHES TO IMPROVING PHYSICIAN EXPERIENCE
How have health systems sought to improve the employee experience to attract and retain physicians? A common strategy has been to add more and more technology tools to make a physician’s practice easier and more efficient. Despite clinicians having increased access to time and effort-saving technologies, why aren’t burnout rates declining fast enough?
In the demanding world of medicine, strategies for a sustainable practice must go beyond technological efficiency. This is primarily because the seconds or minutes saved with new technology are not enough to counterbalance the avalanche of tasks, metrics, and expectations constantly added to a doctor’s day.
Put simply, helping doctors run faster or more easily on the hamster wheel won’t completely dig us out of the burnout crisis. Healthcare systems also need a second strategy: regularly refining and redirecting responsibilities to more appropriate care team members, rather than just defaulting to the doctor.
This isn’t about reducing or minimizing the physician role. It’s about optimizing every ounce of the physician’s role, maximizing engagement in high-value and high- impact work. This is what physicians really want in a practice environment — and it’s ideal for patients and the organization.
The three key strategies below are starting points to reduce physician overload.
1. Metric discipline
Clinicians pay close attention to metrics. These high achievers have been monitoring their performance since kindergarten. So, give doctors a metric and they’re going to feel responsible for it.
With increased competition and growth, adding more and more metrics has become the solution to drive performance. The consequence is that physicians are responsible for too many metrics they cannot, and should not, reasonably manage.
Suggested health system tactics are:
Ask: Is this metric worth the attention, time, and effort of your costliest resource?
Ask: Can/should a physician even be responsible for this metric? If not, why default to them instead of another team member?
Do: Have a process to remove/refine metrics alongside efforts to add new metrics.
Do: Calculate the financial value of physician time saved by removing certain tasks tied to a metric.
2. Communication discipline
While most clinicians would not convert back to an analogue practice, arguably the biggest driver of dissatisfaction involves how technology has created constant and uncontrolled communication access (email, text, paging, smartphone, electronic medical record messages, instant messaging, and so forth) to physicians. This has left physicians inundated with messages, information, and requests that should never have reached them.
Why can’t we ask the physicians to deal with this individually? There is an old saying, “Out of sight, out of mind.” For most physicians, once they get a line of sight into a problem, they want to solve it. Health systems must maintain rigorous discipline in communication inputs to reduce physicians’ cognitive load.
Ask: What categories of information and requests are best handled by non-physician team members?
Do: Ensure physician alignment within a particular specialty or location so that support staff have uniform expectations.
Do: Build in workflows and trainings along with monitoring workflow adherence to reduce provider involvement in messages/requests.
Do: Track how effectively the workflow is working. For example, are support staff forwarding fewer messages to the physician? Are physicians satisfied with how the messages are being handled?
3. Task discipline
A critical piece to optimizing the physician experience is ensuring a physician’s day-to-day tasks are tightly aligned with their capabilities and expertise. Most physicians, however, spend considerable time on tasks better delegated to team members, such as entering orders, documenting, addressing patient messages, and filling out forms. In fact, data from 200,000 American physicians(5) show this type of work adds three extra hours for every eight hours of scheduled patient time.
As a result, establishing a practice environment in which those tasks are adequately handled by support staff is critical. Healthcare systems that can demonstrate that physicians spend less time on burdensome administrative tasks will be much more competitive in recruitment and retention.
Ask: Which tasks and how much time does a physician spend on top-of-license tasks? This will vary by specialty and career stage. Often, EMR platforms like EPIC easily track this information.
Ask: Which non-MD tasks are taking up too much of the physician’s time? What position is needed to complete those tasks?
Do: Delegate to the appropriate care team member and track time saved for the physician and performance by the new care team member.
REDEFINING THE PHYSICIAN ROLE FOR A SUSTAINABLE FUTURE
The fierce competition for top physician talent demands a fundamental shift in how healthcare systems manage physician responsibilities. While technology has offered incremental relief, it cannot solve the deeper issue of responsibility overload. To truly support physicians, healthcare leaders must stop defaulting to the doctor and instead adopt a disciplined, intentional approach to role design.
By applying metrics, communication, and task discipline, organizations can ensure that physicians focus on the work that truly requires their expertise, while empowering the broader care team to handle the rest. This not only enhances the overall physician employee experience, but also strengthens the entire healthcare ecosystem.
References
American Medical Association. AMA President Sounds Alarm on National Physician Shortage. AMA Press Release. October 25, 2023. https://www.ama-assn.org/press-center/ama-press-releases/ama-president-sounds-alarm-national-physician-shortage .
Shanafelt TD, West CP, Sinsky C, Trockel M, Tutty M, Satele DV, Carlasare LE, Dyrbye LN. Changes in Burnout and Satisfaction With Work–Life Integration in Physicians and the General US Working Population Between 2011 and 2023. Mayo Clin Proc. 2025;100(7): 1142–1158. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mayocp.2024.11.031 .
Tawfik DS, Scheid A, Profit J, Shanafelt T, Trockel M, Adair KC, Sexton JB, Ioannidis JPA. Evidence Relating Health Care Provider Burnout and Quality of Care: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis. Ann Intern Med. 2019;171(8): 555–567. https://doi.org/10.7326/M19-1152 .
Shanafelt TD. Career Plans of US Physicians After the First 2 Years of the COVID-19 Pandemic. Mayo Clin Proc. 2023;98(11): 1629–1640. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mayocp.2023.07.006 .
Holmgren AJ, Sinsky CA, Rotenstein L, Apathy NC. National Comparison of Ambulatory Physician Electronic Health Record Use Across Specialties. 2024. J Gen Intern Med. 2024;39(14): 2868–2870. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11606-024-08930-4 .