Physician burnout is declining nationally, job satisfaction is rising, and fewer doctors say they intend to leave their organizations, according to the American Medical Association. Leaders from Northwell Health, Ochsner Health and Sutter Health shared what's driving that progress, and what still isn't fixed, during a session at the Becker's Annual Meeting hosted by the AMA.
Heather Farley, MD, the AMA's group vice president of professional satisfaction and practice sustainability, called this a turning point for the industry, but not a finish line. "That does not mean that it's time to take our foot off the gas," she said, urging systems to keep the momentum building rather than easing up.
The three organizations pointed to specific things that are working. Ochsner Health made leadership development one of five strategic well-being priorities, running a four-day off-campus retreat for physicians called the Personal Leadership Program. Chief wellness officer Nigel Girgrah, MD, said the program has been linked to lower job stress, higher satisfaction and reduced burnout among participants, even though it doesn't prove cause and effect. Sutter Health leaned into ambient AI documentation tools across outpatient clinics. A 2025 study in JAMA Network Open found average documentation time per appointment dropped from 6.2 to 5.3 minutes, and Sutter's chief wellness officer Jill Kacher Cobb, MD, said about half of clinicians reported feeling less rushed while writing notes. Northwell Health focused on culture and connection, hosting twice-yearly physician dinners in each of its markets and a peer-nominated recognition program called the Truly Awards, which drew nominations for roughly 22% of employed physicians last year. Northwell's burnout rate fell from 44% in 2023 to 30% in 2025, based on a survey with a 77% response rate.
The gaps are just as telling. Ochsner found female physicians reported well-being scores nearly 10 percentage points lower than male colleagues, and its data showed women received about 30% more staff messages and 30% more patient messages. Girgrah admitted, "We don't have an answer yet." Sutter still sits at 25% burnout among its medical staff and medical groups, better than the national average but, as Kacher Cobb put it, still a quarter of the workforce. Sutter is now working to scale isolated pockets of success system-wide through a new Office of Wellbeing.
What I'd tell a client about this
If you run any kind of practice or health organization, the lesson here isn't "buy an AI scribe" or "throw a dinner party." It's that measurement drives improvement, and honesty about what the data shows matters more than the headline number. Ochsner didn't just accept a national trend about gender gaps in burnout, its board pushed leadership to find out why it was happening in their own organization specifically. That's the difference between a wellness initiative that looks good in a slide deck and one that actually changes someone's week. As the coach behind this site, I spend a lot of time turning stories like this into one plain lesson for clients: don't manage what you haven't measured, and don't stop measuring once the number improves.
One thing to do this week
Pick one measurable piece of your team's workload, whether that's inbox messages, documentation time, or after-hours work, and actually track it for a week. You don't need a system-wide survey to start. Northwell, Ochsner and Sutter all began with data before they built a fix. You can do the same on a much smaller scale, and it will tell you where your real problem is instead of where you assume it is.
If you want help turning numbers like these into a plan for your own team, that's exactly the kind of coaching conversation I have with clients every week.
Dr. Farley closed the AMA session with a challenge worth repeating to any leader: healthcare systems need to stay "relentless" about balancing job demands against the resources available to meet them. The organizations that take that seriously, she said, will be the ones that lead the industry forward. The same logic applies whether you're running a hospital system or a five-person practice. Burnout doesn't fix itself, but it also doesn't take a massive budget to start moving the needle. It takes attention, a willingness to look at your own numbers, and the discipline to keep looking even after the trend turns positive.
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