The AMA’s latest National Physician Comparison Report shows aggregate physician burnout falling for the third straight year, down to approximately 41.9% in 2025 from 48.2% in 2023. That’s notable progress, but spend five minutes with the specialty-level data, and the picture gets more complicated.
Emergency medicine is still approaching 50% burnout. Obstetrics and gynecology, family medicine, radiology, and anesthesiology all sit above the national average. Hospital-based specialties as a group performed below the overall benchmark on three of five well-being indicators the AMA tracks. Thus, although the aggregate is improving, the people on the front lines of inpatient care are still struggling in many cases.
The data ultimately indicates a measurement problem versus a contradiction, which is costing health systems far more than most CFOs realize.
The aggregation trap
Enterprise wellness programs are built around the average employee, yet specialty teams in hospital settings do not fit this criteria. Their work carries higher acuity, less schedule predictability, more sustained exposure to patient suffering, and in many cases, a deeper administrative burden layered on top of clinical responsibility. When organizations measure and intervene at the enterprise level, they are prescribing the same treatment to patients with different diagnoses.
Aggregate data can tell health system leaders whether a “people problem” exists. It rarely tells them where the problem lives or which interventions are most likely to work. Team-level measurement offers a more actionable view, one with enough resolution to identify specific units, specialties, or practice environments where clinicians are struggling, and to surface the distinct factors driving that distress.
There is also a participation roadblock. Physicians are more likely to engage with well-being initiatives when they believe their unique challenges are understood, and that the data being collected will actually drive change. Burnout is not a uniform condition across healthcare. Measurement strategies that treat it as one will consistently miss the teams that need the most support.
Why standard programs fall short
Hospital-based physicians often feel, correctly, that enterprise wellness programs were designed for someone else. For example, a 15-minute webinar on stress management lands differently when a physician has just come off a 12-hour shift.
Physicians are not burning out because they lack mindfulness training or access to wellness resources. They are burning out because they are working within systems that make it increasingly difficult to do their jobs effectively and sustainably.
A growing contributor is the misalignment between clinical values and organizational priorities. Many physicians enter medicine with a commitment to delivering the highest quality care possible. Over time, they find themselves constrained by financial pressures, productivity expectations, throughput metrics, and operational targets. When the care clinicians believe patients need is in tension with the care the system is structured to support, burnout stops being simple exhaustion and escalates to a manifestation of moral distress.
The most effective interventions begin with listening. They are built around understanding a team’s specific challenges and partnering with clinicians to address the underlying drivers. What physicians need most is hard evidence that the organization is willing to measure, acknowledge, and act on the conditions that make their work harder.
Most health systems have no regular mechanism for a team to reflect on how they communicate, whether people feel safe raising concerns, or whether colleagues feel seen and valued. This has, over time, developed into a major infrastructure gap that’s often disguised as a “lack of resilience”.
What team-specific measurement actually looks like
Team-level measurement starts with a different question. Rather than asking “how burned out are you?” It probes further with deeper intention, “How safe does this team feel raising concerns? Is there trust? Are people showing up as whole people, or are they just showing up?” These are the upstream indicators that predict downstream outcomes like turnover intention, error rates, patient satisfaction, and, naturally, burnout.
Effective measurement requires granularity. It is structured around clinical units, specialties, and care environments, with enough resolution to distinguish a hospitalist service from an outpatient clinic, or even one inpatient team from another. The most useful systems incorporate a set of operationally relevant markers alongside well-being measures such as perceived staffing adequacy, workload intensity, EHR burden, after-hours work, and alignment with leadership priorities.
Critically, the process should move beyond data collection and depend on feedback loops. Teams need to access their own data in near real time, compare it to relevant peers, and see it linked to action. Without this last step, measurement becomes another form of administrative burden rather than a tool for improvement.
The CFO case: Retention as a balance-sheet issue
According to the KLAS Arch Collaborative’s 2024 Clinician Turnover Report, the average cost of replacing a single physician ranges from $500,000 to $1,000,000, accounting for lost revenue during the vacancy, recruitment costs, signing bonuses, and the time before a new physician reaches full productivity. If a specialty team loses two or three physicians in a single year, which is not unusual when burnout goes unaddressed, the financial exposure is immediate. These show up in the actual budget rather than in abstract workforce-planning numbers.
Addressing physician burnout is foundational to both financial performance and operational efficiency. The sustainability of any health system is directly correlated with the people who deliver care. When those individuals are persistently strained, misaligned, or unsupported, every other metric the system values is placed at risk.
The encouraging shift is that health systems making measurable progress on specialty burnout are moving away from one-size-fits-all solutions toward more nuanced, data-informed, and team-specific approaches. As organizations develop the ability to measure burnout at the specialty and unit level, they become better positioned to identify actionable drivers and deploy targeted interventions that match the true problem. Physician engagement is essential to design systems that work, and is no longer optional.
A different starting point
The specialty teams that are still above the benchmark deserve more than an enterprise wellness program designed for someone else. They deserve measurement that wholly understands them at the team level, interventions tailored to their specific conditions, and a system that treats connection and psychological safety as operational infrastructure instead of a soft add-on.
The opportunity ahead is to treat physician well-being as a core strategic priority, measured with the same rigor and acted upon with the same urgency as any other critical performance domain. At $500,000 to $1,000,000 per departure, this is undoubtedly one of the highest-return investments a health system can make.
Photo: PeopleImages, Getty Images
Lauren Fitzpatrick Shanks is the Founder and CEO of KeepWOL, an AI-powered team effectiveness platform. An aerospace engineer by training, she is the first Black woman to graduate from the University of Kansas Aerospace Engineering Department and the first Black woman to win the AIAA International Aircraft Design Competition. KeepWOL has expanded into healthcare, partnering with health systems to improve team dynamics, psychological safety, and belonging.
Dr. Nathan Delafield, MD, FACP, is a Consultant in Community Internal Medicine and Associate Chair of Belonging at Mayo Clinic in Arizona.
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