Shikha Jain: What Healthcare Executives Need to Know About Physician Burnout

Shikha Jain, Founder, Chair of the Board (Former CEO) at Women in Medicine and Associate Professor of Medicine at The University of Illinois Cancer Center, shared a post on LinkedIn:

“Physician burnout is getting worse. There’s no shortage of talk about solutions, but the solutions being implemented won’t have meaningful impact without systemic change.

Three things every healthcare executive should know about physician burnout, and what to do about each, that aren’t on your burnout dashboard:

1. Physicians don’t burn out from working too hard. They burn out from working hard on tasks that don’t require a physician. The fix isn’t fewer hours. It’s redesigning the unit of clinical work. Audit what’s actually on physician plates and ask: does this require an MD? If not, build the team and the tech around removing it, scribes, APPs, async workflows, ambient documentation. These aren’t perks. They’re operational redesign. AI tools are creating new opportunities to do exactly this. Whether they actually reduce physician burden or just become another layer of documentation depends on how they’re implemented. Built thoughtfully, they remove work. Bolted on, they add it.
2. The wellness program you launched last year isn’t being declined because doctors don’t value wellness. It’s being declined because attending one more thing on top of clinical demands is the problem you were trying to solve.Wellness isn’t a program. It’s the byproduct of a workable job. Move the budget upstream, into staffing ratios, panel size, EHR efficiency, and protected non-clinical time. The yoga class can stay. It just can’t be the strategy. Compensate physicians for committee work and all of the work physicians (especially women physicians) are often volun-told to do. The compensation structure was never designed to account for the countless hours of uncompensated work many physicians are required to take on.
3. The physician leaders you’ve been trying to develop have already self-selected out of the leadership track. They watched what ‘leadership’ too often actually required, administrative load with no decision authority, and chose patient care instead. Or they left medicine altogether to lead outside the systems driving the burnout in the first place.

If you want physician leaders, give the role real authority. Decision rights over staffing and workflow. Operational support. Protected time that’s actually protected. Otherwise you’re not developing leaders. You are recruiting volunteers for a role no one wants.

The data on physician departures is already on your desk. The question isn’t whether to address it. The question is whether the current operating model is the one that can.

I’ve been a physician for 15 years and built a national community of Women in Medicine®. The conversations I’m having with peers right now are different than the ones I was having 24 months ago.

What conversations are you hearing?”

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