Bronze-level recognition from the AMA’s Joy in Medicine® Health System Recognition Program marked an important milestone for Sutter Health. However, leaders across the system saw it less as a finish line and more as a starting point of their well-being journey. The designation offered a clear-data-informed view of where physician well-being stood and, just as importantly, where it needed to go next.
Now, over the two years since receiving Bronze-level recognition, Sutter Health is building on that foundation. With a goal of achieving Gold-level recognition, the organization is expanding its efforts, moving beyond measurement to implement new initiatives designed to reduce administrative burden, strengthen team-based care and create more sustainable practice environments across the health system.
Sutter Health is 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.
“Receiving Bronze-level recognition helped us know that we had a strong foundation to build a truly comprehensive, systemwide well-being program,” said Jill Kacher Cobb, MD, an anesthesiologist and chief wellness officer for Sutter Health.
And because of that, “we’re jumping right into applying for Gold as much of the needed work is already happening across our system, and we have the opportunity to align and formalize these efforts,” Dr. Kacher Cobb said.
It started with a look at the criteria
“Right after we received Bronze, we looked at the criteria for Silver and Gold and mapped out the next things that we needed to accomplish,” Dr. Kacher Cobb said. “Many of our efforts have aligned with setting up our new Office of Well-Being, which opened in May of 2025.”
“Our emphasis is on making support easier for our physicians and advanced practice clinicians across all of Sutter Health,” she said.
Destigmatize mental health support
To enhance support for physicians and other health professionals, Sutter Health focused on destigmatizing reaching out for help and support.
“We’re partnering across our health system to remove stigmatizing language surrounding mental health from initial credentialing applications, reapplications and peer reference forms,” Dr. Kacher Cobb said. “It’s important to us that clinicians feel psychologically safe to talk about mental health and confidentially access support when they need it.”
This focus on psychological safety led to Sutter Health being recognized by the Dr. Lorna Breen Heroes’ Foundation as a Wellbeing First Champion in the fall of 2025.
“At Sutter Health, we say patients first, people always, and that means we’re committed to building an environment built on candor, vulnerability, trust and inclusivity, where team members feel comfortable asking for help when they need it,” Dr. Kacher Cobb said. “By caring for our caregivers, we also ensure that our patients are receiving the best care possible.”
Reduce administrative burdens
“A major priority for Sutter Health and the Office of Well-Being is to help make work easier for our physicians and advanced practice clinicians,” said Dr. Kacher Cobb.
One key resource supporting physicians and other health professionals has been the use of augmented intelligence (AI). In recent years, Sutter Health has embraced ambient AI and automated in-basket response technology to help reduce unnecessary manual administrative tasks and cognitive load, enabling more personal patient interactions and more sustainable care delivery.
“Sutter’s CMIO Dr. Veena Jones and her team have been leading the way and have placed Sutter Health at the forefront of utilizing this technology,” she said. “Spreading ambient AI tools across the organization has really been an amazing benefit for our clinicians.”
“We initially rolled out ambient AI tools for outpatient clinicians, and in 2025 we expanded to inpatient care. Sutter Health was the first health system to implement an ambient AI scribe integrated into the EHR for inpatient use at scale—across all of our hospitals,” Dr. Kacher Cobb said. “We did run into some barriers, and the team is working closely with our technology partners to add additional functionalities and make it more user friendly and expand usage in the inpatient setting, in particular in the emergency department.”
Sutter Health is also using automated response technology for the in-basket across the organization to manage high volumes of patient portal communication, including lab results, medication refills and general medical advice. The technology generates a draft reply using the large language models that are integrated into Epic. This streamlines the response process for routine messaging.
“It reduces the need to create a manual draft, which has decreased physician and advanced practice clinician time spent on repetitive messaging tasks and has reduced cognitive fatigue from the high message volume,” she said.
Lastly, Sutter Health also launched a pilot project for ambient AI order entry during patient encounters. When a physician verbalizes a diagnosis and treatment plan, the AI will queue the medication order within the EHR. This eliminates the need for physicians to place orders.
Automate removal of expired orders
“The team also worked to reduce other administrative burdens for our clinicians to make work easier. For example, a process was created for automated removal of expired orders and covered work,” said Dr. Kacher Cobb. “This reduced the time spent manually clearing these items.”
“We were finally able to remove the second authentication after delivery for our obstetricians and family medicine physicians. Before, they had to manually type in a second authentication code after each delivery,” she said. “The team worked with Epic to remove that unnecessary second signature functionality. Dr. Laurie Gregg, the Sutter Epic team and the OB service line were integral in moving this forward.”
Further embed and centralize support
For 2026, Dr. Kacher Cobb and her well-being team will be working to build on and make peer support easier. This requires embedding the peer support program across the whole system.
“While we have a system peer support program, the utilization has been fairly low,” she said. “By centralizing support resources and embedding support resource sharing into operational workflows, we’re making it easier to use.”
“The well-being team attends the daily system safety huddle and whenever we hear about a critical event, we ask the leaders to help us reach those who were impacted so we can quickly connect them to peer support. That has helped so many people,” Dr. Kacher Cobb said.
Assess data and expand work
Every fall Sutter Health surveys physicians and other health professionals across the organization. With new results in hand, Dr. Kacher Cobb plans to re-evaluate the work they are doing to see if other initiatives will help expand on their well-being work.
With help from the AMA’s Organizational Biopsy® combined with Sutter Health’s annual survey, “the benefit is now we have a higher “n” and we’re also preventing survey fatigue,” she said. “We feel that our well-being data now is more valuable because more people participate in our annual survey compared to the well-being pulse survey and there’s a lot of effort that goes into the promotion of the survey.”
“We’ve gotten our preliminary results and are reviewing with our research team. Then we divide it out by location and specialty in the hospitals to look at burnout, intention to leave, intention to reduce FTE, and alignment and see where our hot spots are for the medical staffs,” said Dr. Kacher Cobb. “Also, Sutter-aligned medical groups do a deep dive into their individual results and create annual action plans to improve workplace well-being. We continue to see improvement year over year since 2022.”
“While we have seen improvement with a burnout rate now of 25%, we still have a lot of work to do,” she said.
Learn more from Dr. Kacher Cobb about how Sutter Health came together as one system to address physician well-being.
AMA STEPS Forward® offers real-world solutions to common challenges in health care today. Explore a variety of innovative, physician-developed resources designed to help prevent physician burnout, optimize workflows, improve well-being and enhance patient care.
Download the 2025 AMA Joy in Medicine magazine (log into your AMA account to view) to see whether your organization is part of the prestigious group of 164 organizations across 40 states and the District of Columbia that are currently recognized for their dedication to physician well-being.
