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).
The well-being of physicians is not just a metric, it is a mandate. And that has been clearly established at Advocate Health where assessing physician burnout is not just a data exercise. It’s a vital tool for change.
These assessments serve a dual purpose: identifying areas where support is most needed, and amplifying physician perspectives to guide meaningful, systemic improvement. It's not about what leadership assumes is best—it’s about what their physicians are saying loud and clear.
That feedback is what drives Advocate Health’s “Best Place to Care” strategy where the voices of their physicians don’t just inform their well-being initiatives, they define them.
“We use multiple modalities for data, and we use the data that is specifically given to us from the voices of our physicians and advanced practice professionals to inform our Best Place to Care strategy,” says Suzanna Fox, MD, an ob-gyn and chief physician executive for the North Carolina and Georgia division of Advocate Health.
“It’s the actual voices of our physicians and advanced practice professionals that drive that, not something that we may or may not think is the right thing,” Dr. Fox adds. “We take what they tell us and then that’s what drives our strategy.”
But it is also about “trying to be very conscious of not over surveying our physicians,” she says.
Working with the AMA “was a natural fit for us because our values aligned so much,” Dr. Fox says. “When you’re working with an organization that has the same values, then we’re all rowing in the same direction.”
While a lot of the questions used in the Organizational Biopsy are the same as other health systems, the AMA makes it easy for Advocate Health to add their own questions for what they want to hear from physicians.
“We have a longstanding history of doing engagement and asking adjacent questions around well-being and burnout,” says Moore. “But until we started using the Organizational Biopsy, we never had a dedicated burnout measure or job stress measure that we were looking at with this level of frequency.”
Looking at trends in well-being
Measuring physician burnout and well-being is one thing. It is also important to look at the trends to determine the next course of action.
“We’ve got several bright spots, and we are really proud of them. We’ve got very high job satisfaction, which that recruitment and retention is absolutely connected to that,” says Dr. Fox. “We’ve improved our burnout statistics over time, and we’ve improved that year over year.”
Additionally, physicians at Advocate Health “feel very connected tom their leaders,” she adds. “We also know that they feel very connected to our mission at Advocate Health, which is that we take care of anyone regardless of their background.”
