To improve physician well-being, measuring engagement isn’t enough. Health systems need validated well-being assessments to understand documentation burden, operational reliability, leadership support, feeling valued and team culture.
Most importantly, they need to ask questions that physicians can trust.
Leaders from Northwell Health, Ochsner Health and Sutter Health drove home this point during a session on physician well-being at the Becker's Annual Meeting hosted by the AMA. The health systems are part of the AMA Health System Member Program, which provides enterprise solutions to equip leadership, physicians and care teams with resources to help drive the future of medicine.
The AMA’s latest national physician comparison report, which draws data from about 19,000 physicians nationwide, offers "reason for hope" while reinforcing that significant work remains, said Heather Farley, MD, MHCDS, group vice president of professional satisfaction and practice sustainability at the AMA.
"At a high level, we're seeing meaningful progress," Dr. Farley said, noting that physician burnout has declined to 42% today.
While "42% is still not where we want to be," she said, the improvement suggests that investments health systems have made in physician well-being and experience are beginning to pay off.
Nevertheless, 32% of physicians said they intended to leave their organization within two years, and 56% said they didn’t feel valued by their organization.
Burnout still prevalent among all physician specialties
Looking more closely at the data, Dr. Farley highlighted three key trends. Although well-being is better overall, "it's improving unequally across specialties."
Some physician specialties, particularly emergency medicine, continue to experience disproportionately high burnout rates. That means organization-wide well-being strategies should be paired with local efforts that address the unique challenges facing high-risk physician specialties.
The second trend is a modest but meaningful decline in physicians' intent to leave their organizations.
"Reasons that physicians give are consistent across all demographics," Dr. Farley said, pointing to inefficient workflows and administrative burdens as the primary drivers.
Meanwhile, feeling valued has also emerged as a key factor in physician well-being.
"It's not enough to just roll out recognition programs," she said. "At its core, feeling valued is about voice and agency."
Physicians need to feel heard and believe they can influence the environment in which they work, Dr. Farley said. "That's what helps them to feel valued. It's also what builds trust with leadership.”
As one example, she highlighted “Getting Rid of Stupid Stuff” initiatives, which encourage physicians to identify unnecessary administrative tasks and inefficiencies. Programs like these, Dr. Farley said, send "a really powerful signal" that leaders are listening, taking time to understand physicians' work environments and removing obstacles that get in the way of patient care. This is the type of activity that builds trust and makes physicians feel valued, she added.
Measure the right thing
Dr. Farley drew a sharp distinction between burnout, well-being and engagement, noting that engagement surveys are useful but often do not measure the unique drivers of physician burnout.
One of the biggest misconceptions about physician well-being is that organizations often treat engagement and well-being as interchangeable.
"They're related, but they're separate constructs," she said, explaining that a physician can be deeply engaged in their work while also experiencing significant burnout. As a result, employee engagement surveys alone are not enough because "most of them are not designed to assess physician well-being or to assess the unique drivers of physician burnout."
Organizations also need to move beyond the old days of measuring individual physician resilience and then rolling out mindfulness apps or sleep hygiene education in response, Dr. Farley advised. Research now shows that "the majority of the drivers of physician well-being and experience come from the environment in which they work."
Instead, she advocated using validated physician well-being assessment tools that provide a more comprehensive view of the work environment. She pointed to the AMA Organizational Biopsy®, which is a survey "designed by physicians for physicians" that’s been deployed to more than 300 organizations.
Unlike standard engagement surveys, the assessment examines physicians' perceptions of practice efficiency, EHR burden, operational reliability, teamwork, leadership support, feeling valued by your organization and collegiality.
"Instead of focusing solely on engagement," Dr. Farley said, "it is crucial for organizations to expand the scope of our assessments to include the unique drivers of physician experience and well-being, providing leaders with a much more complete picture of the state of our workforce."
As the leader in physician well-being, the AMA provides organizational solutions that help physicians and health systems optimize practice efficiency, reduce burnout, and rediscover the Joy in Medicine®.
Make survey data useful
Helping senior leaders and boards understand the distinction between physician well-being and engagement has been a top priority for Nigel Girgrah, MD, PhD, a transplant hepatologist and chief wellness officer for Ochsner Health.
"I look at well-being as the effect of the occupational environment on the individual," said Dr. Girgrah. Engagement, by contrast, reflects "what that individual physician is wanting to give back to the organization."
Ochsner Health’s strategy starts with its board of directors—and cascades results from there. The board is the first to receive physician well-being survey results.
“It's essential to include them because board members need to understand the state of physician well-being to direct organizational resources and priorities,” Dr. Girgrah explained.
After presenting the findings to the board, the results are shared with facility, division and service-line leaders.
Physician well-being should be viewed as a core quality measure, Dr. Girgrah emphasized. "Well-being is a quality indicator, if not the quality indicator."
It influences patient experience, quality and safety outcomes, physician retention and discretionary effort, making it a strategic priority for health system leadership. “It’s essential,” he summarized.
Cut survey fatigue
To cut survey fatigue and boost useful data, Sutter Health decided to embed the AMA Organizational Biopsy questions into their annual survey.
“Survey fatigue is real," said Jill Kacher Cobb, MD, an anesthesiologist who is Sutter Health’s chief wellness officer and vice president. Physicians and nonphysician providers are frequently asked to complete surveys from medical societies, health systems and internal departments.
Sutter Health administers several surveys, including an annual employee experience survey and assessments focused on the EHR.
"We place a high amount of value on our annual experience of work survey," Dr. Kacher Cobb said, using the results to shape organizational goals for the following year.
Those efforts have produced strong participation, with response rates of 50% to 60% across the medical staff and more than 80% within medical groups.
Integrating the questions into Sutter Health’s annual survey produced a much larger sample size and more robust well-being data while also reducing the number of surveys physicians and nonphysician providers were asked to complete.
"We had better data that we could act upon for well-being," she said, "and we were able to reduce survey fatigue."
Listening starts with asking the right questions
Northwell Health focused on creating a physician survey that generated meaningful insights while building trust in the feedback process. By redesigning the survey, incorporating physician well-being measures and prioritizing transparency, the organization increased physician participation to 77% (more than 4,000 respondents), creating a stronger foundation for organizational improvement.
Feedback from Northwell’s 2023 physician survey created an opportunity to better align future assessments with physicians’ needs and priorities, said Mark Talamini, MD, senior vice president and executive director for Northwell Health Physician Partners.
When he took the job as executive director four and a half years ago, Dr. Talamini recalls being advised that physician surveys must be meaningful and actionable if leaders expect physicians to participate. Those priorities became especially clear following the organization’s 2023 physician survey. Physicians shared that the survey could be more concise and better reflect their day-to-day experiences, creating an opportunity for Northwell to redesign the process and reinforce confidence that feedback would lead to meaningful action.
Importantly, Northwell had already demonstrated its commitment to acting on physician feedback, including launching a major EHR modernization initiative in response to physicians’ calls for improvements. Nevertheless, the survey experience underscored opportunities to strengthen the feedback process.
Working with the medical group and human resources teams, the organization partnered closely with its physician-led Physician Well-being and Physician Engagement Committees to redesign the survey. One colleague even suggested asking a single open-ended question—"What improvement(s) would you recommend to make Northwell Health a better place to work?"—and using a large language model to analyze the responses.
Northwell Health built a shorter survey around three priorities. First, leaders wanted benchmarking data from a national vendor. Second, they incorporated the AMA's Organizational Biopsy survey questions. Third, they included organization-specific questions they genuinely wanted physicians to answer.
The rollout was equally important.
"We invested heavily in communicating its importance," Dr. Talamini said, using videos from executives and frontline physicians, along with repeated reminders in the organization's newsletter. The strategy increased physician response rates from approximately 50% to 77%, reflecting strong engagement and confidence in the organization’s commitment to listening and acting on physician feedback.
For Northwell, collecting feedback was only the first step. Equally important was ensuring physicians could see how their input informed decisions and meaningful organizational change. Following the survey, Dr. Talamini convened service line chairs to review the results, share best practices and discuss opportunities to address physician feedback. To support these efforts, Northwell developed an enterprise-wide physician resource guide and provided service line leaders with tools, resources and a structured framework to help communicate results transparently and develop action plans tailored to their physicians' needs.
Turn data into one action
With surveys, each team should focus on one thing, urged Dr. Girgrah. "We live in an attention economy. "Increasingly my role isn't necessarily to solve problems, but to create a burning platform and to focus."
With health systems facing countless competing priorities, leaders are more likely to make progress by concentrating on a handful of issues rather than trying to address everything at once.
In recent years, Ochsner Health has encouraged physician leaders to review the findings openly with their teams and develop a focused action plan, identifying a single improvement they can make over the coming year.
"You have to make it simple," Dr. Girgrah said. "Don't boil the ocean. Just work on one thing you saw in the survey."
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