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Clinician Burnout Report
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Burnout by the Numbers
40%
Percentage of physicians who said that having no control over their workload was a contributor to burnout, according to a 2024 KLAS Research report.
46%
Nearly half of healthcare workers reported feeling burned out in 2022, up from 32% in 2018.
$4.6B
Burnout is estimated to cost the healthcare system more than $4 billion annually, largely due to turnover and work-hour reductions among primary care physicians.
$81K
The National Bureau of Economic Research says burned-out clinicians are less productive. Organizations can experience an $81,000 decrease in revenue for every burnedout physician.
US
Physicians
According to the AMA, burnout among US physicians has improved since 2021, but they still remain at a notably higher risk for burnout compared to other US workers.
20%
As many as 1 in 5 healthcare workers encounter physical abuse, and verbal abuse is even more common.
Staff reduction, administrative burden, and lack of support
Respondents to an AMA survey cited the shortage of nurses and medical assistants, excessive administrative burden, and lack of support staff as major contributors to job stress.
Why is burnout so prevalent in medicine?
Caring for others is deeply rewarding, but medicine is inherently high stress. Clinicians face long hours, emotional demands, and growing administrative burdens, all of which contribute to widespread burnout.
High-Stress Profession by Nature
Every specialty comes with its own pressures, but some stressors are universal:
- Administrative overload from paperwork and
- Electronic Health Record (EHR) tasks
- Safety risks like infectious disease and patient violence
- High patient acuity
- Understaffed shifts
- Emotionally intense patient care
Physician Shortage
The US may face a shortage of up to 86,000 physicians by 2036, with primary care hardest hit. These shortages create:
- Increased provider workload
- Longer patient wait times and strained relationships
- Higher risk of burnout from heavier shift loads
Lack of Autonomy
38% of new physicians prioritize worklife balance when choosing their first job. Though burnout levels have dropped post-pandemic, the AMA suggests that “physician practices and health systems might be able to ameliorate burnout—and hence, its damaging effects—by giving physicians more control over their jobs and workdays.” This is influenced by a study co-authored by the AMA and Mayo Clinic, which found burnout was reported by 75% of health professionals who lacked control over their workload and schedules, compared to just 39% among those who felt they had good control—a difference of 36 percentage points.
What do all these numbers mean? Without schedule autonomy, clinicians face an uphill battle:
- Unpredictable schedules that can change suddenly
- Limited ability to plan their lives and take time away from work
As Dr. Ted Epperly put it in the New England Journal of Medicine:
“Physicians are looking for both flexibility and fluidity in their jobs. As stress has increased in medical practices, physicians view job flexibility as one antidote. They want some control over their practice lives.”
Autonomy extends beyond scheduling. In a digital-first environment, clinicians are constantly bombarded by messages. They want some control over how and when they’re contacted—not just when they work.
Unstructured communication fuels burnout. Honoring communication preferences protects focus, supports work-life balance, and reduces alarm fatigue.
Still, autonomy must be balanced with safeguards that ensure urgent messages always break through.
Unrealistic, Inequitable Scheduling
Beyond lacking autonomy, many clinicians are frustrated with how schedules are built— often inflexible, opaque, and packed with nights, weekends, and too little time off. It’s easy to see how these frustrations contribute to increased burnout levels:
- US physicians work an average of 51 hours per week.
- 25% of US physicians work more than 60 hours per week.
- Residents are expected to work 80 hours a week.
Outdated scheduling methods are perhaps the biggest contributor to unfair schedules.
Balancing patient needs, organizational goals, and provider preferences is complex. One small change can create a domino effect that unravels the entire schedule. Expecting humans to manage this without help is unrealistic and unsustainable.
Building schedules by hand or with rudimentary tools almost guarantees mistakes, coverage gaps, and uneven shift distribution. These issues don’t just frustrate clinicians—they directly impact patient care and operations:
- Delayed patient care: Nurses and providers may have to waste time tracking down the right on-call clinician.
- Lost clinical hours: When providers are tasked with building or fixing schedules, that pulls them away from patient care.
- Financial impact: Scheduling errors that delay procedures or reduce access mean missed revenue opportunities.
Cumbersome Communication Workflows
A 2018 time and motion study revealed that nurses spend over a third of their time each day managing communication. And because clinical communication is the backbone of care delivery, convoluted or inefficient communication wastes time and increases stress levels across the care team.
Outdated communication and scheduling technology contribute heavily here. Possible issues include:
Lost, delayed, or unanswered messages
- Uncertainty about who to contact for a given clinical situation
- Increased cognitive load from juggling multiple platforms
- Missed or mistimed disruptions that alert the wrong person or no one at all
- Different team members often need different information at different times, creating tension and misalignment
- Ineffective systems lead to insecure workarounds, increasing compliance risk
When communication becomes a barrier to care delivery, clinicians may even experience moral distress if they’re unable to give patients the attention and quality of care they deserve.
Administrative and Documentation Burdens
With the shift to value-based care under the Affordable Care Act, clinicians face growing documentation demands, leaving less time for patients and more time behind a screen. Physicians now spend an average of 2.6 hours per week complying with external quality measures, and two hours on administrative work for every hour of face-to-face care.
EHRs often compound this burden. Many are unintuitive, slow, and disconnected from real clinical workflows.
Together, documentation overload and poor EHR design can extinguish the human element of care. Clinicians feel more like data entry clerks than healers. What starts as a spark of frustration quickly ignites, leaving only the embers of what once was a calling to heal.
Shouldn’t patient care mean more than clicking boxes?
Over Half
Some physicians spend over half of a 12-hour shift documenting.
13-40%
of physician burnout is connected to EHR-related stress.
What are the symptoms of clinical burnout?
Clinician burnout often shows up through a combination of emotional, physical, and behavioral symptoms tied to work. Common signs include:
- Chronic mental, physical, or emotional exhaustion
- Feeling detached, negative, or cynical about work
- Loss of motivation or a diminished sense of accomplishment
- Reduced efficiency or difficulty concentrating
- Treating patients or tasks in an impersonal, mechanical way (Depersonalization)
34.5%
of US residents reported burnout in 2024—a drop from previous years, but still over one-third of trainees
58%
of US nurses say they feel burned out most days, based on a 2025 survey of more than 12,000 respondents
37.2%
of medical students experience burnout, per a 2022 global metaanalysis covering nearly 27,000 students
5 Steps to Diagnose Burnout
Use “FLAME”
Now you know why burnout is so prevalent and how to recognize some of the most important signs. But how do you diagnose where burnout is coming from in your organization?
Use this diagnostic guide to pinpoint where burnout is happening and what’s contributing to it. Remember to stop the FLAME before it spreads!
F
Foster Open Dialogue: Burnout is human—not a weakness. To identify it, organizations must first break the silence. Create a culture where discussing stress is safe, supported, and stigma-free. When clinicians feel empowered to speak up, meaningful change becomes possible.
L
Listen to Understand: Go beyond surface-level complaints. Pinpoint the root causes of stress and burnout by gathering feedback, analyzing workloads, and examining contributors that may not be obvious at first.
Here are a few questions to ask:
- Are workloads across the care team as fair and balanced as possible?
- Are current tech systems user-friendly? Has the entire care team received adequate training to use them effectively?
- Is there any redundant or repetitive work that could be offloaded or alleviated?
- Is it easy for care team members to communicate with one another? Is communication reliable and accurate?
- What solutions cause the most workflow disruptions?
- Are there processes in place to help the care team feel safe and supported at all times?
A
Audit Burnout Hotspots: After listening in detail to your team, look closely at the workflows, policies, and pressures that are quietly wearing your team down. If you need to, expand your understanding with surveys, interviews, and observational feedback to uncover where burnout is most likely coming from and gather data to support your findings.
M
Map the Pressure Points: Patterns matter. Once you’ve gathered feedback, connect the dots to see where the strain is concentrated.
Are specific roles, shifts, or departments consistently stretched too thin? Mapping these pressure points helps prioritize the areas that need attention first.
E
Explore What Could Change: What solutions are available to soften or even eliminate the identified pressure points? Before simply replacing solutions and workflows, what technology could be updated or integrated to mitigate stressors that contribute to burnout? Can existing processes be simplified?
Collaborate on possible remedies, whether it’s staffing changes or peer support groups and wellness initiatives. If and when better tech systems are found, discuss key governance and change management needs before making any decisions.
One important note: make sure all key stakeholders have a seat at the table to offer their opinion.
Pro Tip:
Once you’ve put out the FLAMEs, you can begin making incremental changes to chip away at the underlying problems. Be sure to track key indicators like turnover, satisfaction, and engagement to monitor long-term improvements.
7 Steps to Combat Clinical Burnout
For too long, clinicians have long been expected to solve burnout on their own through yoga, meditation, and mindfulness strategies. While these more personal tools do have some intrinsic value, systemic change is the only way to meaningfully address burnout across your organization.
Here’s how to start.
Step 1
Normalize conversations about burnout.
Denial and stigma only worsen the problem. Organizations must create a culture where clinicians feel safe acknowledging burnout without fear of judgment. Get started by:
- Encouraging open dialogue about stress and workload.
- Using the FLAME framework to identify burnout drivers.
- Listening to clinician concerns and acting on them.
Wellness and
Burnout Resources
for Clinicians
Wellness Resources
Step 2
Use smarter tools to ease everyday burdens.
Outdated tools and workflows are daily stressors. Modern clinical technology can lighten the load, reduce friction, and improve efficiency—without requiring more time or logins.
1.
Scheduling
Think about this: There are rest regulations for pilots and truck drivers, but not clinicians. Shouldn’t their schedules support their well-being too?
If you’re still manually scheduling in Excel, it’s time to upgrade to an automated scheduling platform that can:
- Quickly create fair, balanced schedules
- Incorporate individual preferences, shift swaps, and time-off requests with minimal manual work
- Still allow manager oversight for sensitive changes
2.
Clinical Communication
If care team messages are the cars, the schedule is the road (or map) that allows the messages to get to the right provider at the right time.
Together, scheduling and communication systems work in tandem to improve collaboration and patient care coordination. Modern clinical communication software can:
- Route messages accurately to reduce delays and frustration
- Minimize alarm fatigue and accelerate response times
- Integrate with scheduling systems to eliminate the “Who’s covering this patient?”” and “Who’s working today?”” guesswork entirely
Step 3
Streamline documentation and improve EHR usability.
EHRs are powerful, but they’ve become synonymous with excessive documentation. Some vendors push their platforms for every function, creating an all-consuming—and often overwhelming—interface.
Author and physician Dr. Devan Moodley says EHRs are “cluttered with information [due to lack of] customization,” and struggle to meet diverse user needs because “a single system is used to cater [to] a variety of different users within a healthcare setting.”
In a word, EHRs are “clunky.” It’s unfair that clinicians bear the burden of navigating complicated interfaces while already stretched thin.
Simplifying documentation is a shared responsibility—EHR vendors, health systems, and policymakers all need to act to bring about meaningful change. Meanwhile, clinicians should keep advocating for meaningful targeted workflow improvements within their organizations and the industry at large.
Step 4
Integrate essential technologies to free up clinician time.
While EHR improvements are ongoing, organizations can immediately reduce clinician burden by streamlining workflows with fewer—but smarter—tools. Simplifying logins, cutting redundant steps, and consolidating vendors saves time, money, and hassle.
Key integrations include:
- Speech recognition and natural language processing (NLT) to cut down note-taking time
- Integrated communication and scheduling that route messages and alerts automatically to the right person, improving care coordination
- Optimized scheduling tools that create fairer schedules, simplify shift swaps and PTO requests, and serve as a transparent source of truth
The best tools are flexible, user-friendly, and built to evolve. A thoughtful, integrated tech stack frees clinicians to spend less time clicking and more time caring.
Step 5
Give valuable time back to nurses.
Nurses are the backbone of care coordination, whether it’s working with families, physicians, specialists, or support staff. But their attention is constantly pulled away from patients by inefficient workflows.
A 2018 study found that in a 4-hour window, nurses spent just 32 minutes with patients and 51 minutes coordinating care. That’s more than a third of their time lost to communication tasks. Ironically, technology aimed at improving nurse workflows has often contributed to this frustration by adding siloed, task-specific “solutions” to their workload.
The result? Burnout and turnover.
To retain nurses, we need to reduce busywork and give them tools that actually help. A few examples could be:
- Diverting routine tasks like water requests to other roles—maybe a patient care tech, for example
- Equipping nurses with mobile devices so they can stay current on patient status without being tethered to the bedside
- Using the same mobile devices to centralize and bring more order to communications (messages, calls, alerts & alarms, etc.) so nurses can focus on the patient they’re currently seeing
15%
A 2023 meta-analysis found a 15% turnover rate among North American nurses.
40%
Since 2022, over 138,000 nurses have left the workforce, with nearly 40% more planning to exit by 2029.
Step 6
Protect your people.
Violence and harassment in healthcare are far too common—and not discussed nearly enough.
A 2023 CDC report found that 13% of healthcare workers reported being harassed at work in 2022, more than double the rate from 2018. If you’re being harassed at work, you’re much more likely to experience stress, helplessness, and burnout.
The CDC recommends several steps to prevent violence and harassment in healthcare settings:
- Comply with Joint Commission violence prevention standards
- Provide training to help staff recognize and prevent violent behavior
- Engage staff to identify risk factors and sources of frustration
- Establish formal systems for threat assessment and post-incident evaluation
15%
A 2023 meta-analysis found a 15% turnover rate among North American nurses.
Technology can also be your best friend. Imagine a nurse sensing escalating behavior during a patient interaction. With the right communication platform, she could discreetly trigger an alert, instantly notifying security and key team members.
These silent, rapid-alert systems already exist in some facilities and are a powerful way to support safety, confidence, and peace of mind for clinical staff.
Step 7
Offer wellness resources to your team.
No matter the size of your organization or team, fostering an environment that prioritizes wellness can improve clinician morale as a whole. If you’ve already worked to reduce stigma (Step 1), you’re on the right path.
The AMA notes that “feeling valued is a striking mitigator of burnout.”7 When leaders actively listen and respond to staff needs, clinicians feel seen, supported, and respected.
It’s crucial to follow through and offer:
- Tangible workflow & tech changes: Fairer scheduling, smarter communication tools, and simplified documentation systems make a real difference in daily stress levels.
- Wellness resources: Offer access to confidential mental health support, floating holidays, and regular wellness activities to promote resilience and recovery.
Fortunately, it’s increasingly common for medical schools, residency programs, and other clinical settings to offer wellness support. Get started here.
Conclusion
Clinician burnout isn’t about a lack of resilience—it’s a reflection of unsustainable workloads, outdated technology, and other systemic challenges. It affects every role, from medical students to seasoned providers.
The good news? Burnout is not unavoidable.
By taking practical steps to understand clinical burnout in your organization, you can start conversations and make changes to help break the cycle. And these changes won’t just help clinicians—the benefits will trickle down to patients, too.
Change doesn’t happen overnight, but every improvement moves your team toward a healthier, more sustainable future. Clinicians shouldn’t have to choose between their calling and their well-being. With the right strategies, we can build a healthcare system where both thrive.