This story is one of more than 20 health system profiles featured in the 2025 AMA Joy in Medicine® magazine (log into your AMA account to view).
Amy A. Jibilian, MD, recently traveled to New Zealand, far away from the East Coast where she serves at Lehigh Valley Health Network (LVHN)—part of Jefferson Health—as the chief wellness officer. During the trip, she felt the pull to check email and make sure her work kept moving while away.
“I really needed to walk the talk and disconnect the way we are encouraging physicians to do when they are off work,” Dr. Jibilian says. “It was more challenging than I thought to not give into the habit of regularly checking work email. Physicians must make a proactive decision to truly unplug, but also if we don’t have the right support system in place, then no one will feel at ease leaving their work for any length of time.”
“Based on a survey that we did at LVHN, we learned that about 60% of our physicians are not taking their full vacation time. And 70% of us are working while we’re away,” says Dr. Jibilian. “The two greatest obstacles that were identified that prevent physicians from taking PTO and not doing patient care related tasks while on vacation were concerns about creating additional work for their colleagues and the amount of work that would be waiting for them when they returned from PTO.”
“We are creating a new PTO task force and one of our goals is to give our physicians more peace of mind to take restorative time off and to disconnect from work by developing a support system in place to care for their patients and cover their work while they are away,” she adds.
Joy in Medicine® may sound elusive in today’s health care environment, but at Lehigh Valley Health Network, that vision is at the heart of a systemic and cultural transformation.
Rather than offering a patchwork of self-care tips or vague wellness initiatives, Dr. Jibilian and her team are actively restructuring clinical workflows, advocating for policy change, and listening to the needs of their physicians and staff. In doing so, they are working to reshape the culture to support physicians in meaningful, measurable ways.
Making technology work
A critical part of Lehigh Valley Health Network’s strategy is optimizing technology to reduce the administrative burden that so often leads to physician burnout. Dr. Jibilian points to the EHR as one of the primary sources of after-hours work, or “pajama time.”
To take steps to reduce administrative burden, LVHN created an EHR optimization task force, bringing together clinical informatics leaders, nonphysician providers, physicians and “super users” across LVHN.
One success came in the form of streamlining refill requests. Using Epic data to identify common bottlenecks, the team created protocols allowing triage staff to fulfill medication refills that met specific criteria, dramatically reducing interruptions to physician workflows.
