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In a modern physician office, teamwork should be a well-choregraphed dance. The head nurse bridges the gap between administrative flow and clinical precision, physicians trade weekend or late-night shifts to prevent burnout, the front office staff acts as financial gatekeepers while assistants ensure warm patient handoffs, so no patient falls through the cracks.
A recent study conducted by the American Medical Association (AMA) found some innovative programs around the country where collaborative teamwork has made the difference in alleviating stress and creating better work-life balance for doctors.
Here are just three inspirational initiatives:
Offering a Wide Range of Concierge Services
At Sanford Health, which serves a large rural area across the Upper Midwest, retaining physicians has been a challenge. To combat this, the leaders of this healthcare system set up a ‘clinician experience’ office led by a team with the sole focus of making sure Sanford’s doctors are well cared for — from the moment they’re hired.
The team has a broad range of capabilities, including handling such at-work needs as on-boarding (including taking new hires to get their badge, photos, and white coat), showing them around the hospital as well as offering free coaching and counseling.
Assistance with any personal needs is also within the purview of the team.
“We handle anything they need help with, whether it’s helping a new hire find a gym or daycare,” Heather Spies, MD, an ob/gyn and Sanford Health’s physician director of clinician experience and well-being, in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, told Medscape Medical News. “We can even help arrange for someone to come to their home and set up their heating and cooling system before they move into their home.”
Since Sanford began implementing this program, hiring one clinician experience liaison in each of Sanford’s six markets, the turnover rate within the company has steadily decreased from 11% to 5.8% over the course of the last year. Retaining physicians has, in turn, had a huge impact on the company’s bottom line.
“We’ve saved $27 million since we started this program, which makes sense if you consider the fact that the AMA says it costs $800,000 to replace a doctor when they leave,” she said. “When you invest in clinician experience, it’s very worthwhile for everyone.”
About Medscape Insights
Medscape continually surveys physicians and other medical professionals about key practice challenges and current issues, creating high-impact analyses. For example, Medscape Physician Happiness Index 2025 found that:
- 32% of doctors surveyed said their work-life diminishes the quality of their personal life.
- 43% of the physicians surveyed felt their quality of life was worse or much worse than non-doctor friends.
- Only 10% of surveyed doctors were very satisfied with their work-life balance.
Alleviating the Burden of Endless Rx Refills
By creating a centralized pharmacy services team, physicians at Geisinger, which serves 1.2 million people in urban and rural communities around central and northeastern Pennsylvania, are no longer as time crunched as they once were.
Initially, a team of 13 pharmacists, pharmacy techs, and medical access coordinators were tasked with helping primary care doctors process refill requests and prior authorizations. Today, 200 staff members across 163 care sites, including 10 hospital campuses, handle 110,000 refill requests per month and 90,000 prior authorizations annually for both primary care doctors and specialists, said Jerry Greskovic, RPh, MBA, Geisinger’s vice president of ambulatory pharmacy services in Scranton, Pennsylvania.
“The whole idea for this started when our chief medical officer — now our CEO — saw the burden doctors were facing with these requests,” he said. “He came up with the idea of creating a pharmacy-based team that would help with all of these medication-related requests.”
Best of all, the team does more than approve prescription refills and work with insurance companies to secure precertifications. In addition, there are protocols in place in the system’s electronic health records to make sure refills are necessary, that the patient is up-to-date on doctor’s appointments, and that nothing is missing from the patient’s overall health assessment.
“We knew our team needed to do more and, for us, that meant we needed to make sure we’re making a positive impact on our patients,” Greskovic added. “For example, when we get these calls, we’ll find out if there are any clinical care gaps for our patients, including whether they should be on a particular medication (or not) and if their health condition is under control.”
Prior authorizations and precertification requests can also be handled way more speedily than they are at the doctor’s office.
“These processes are cumbersome and take a lot of time for doctors,” Greskovic said. “But we’ve shown that we can do this in almost half the time as a doctor’s office because our team does these so often that they’re really good at it. They know exactly what they need to get the paperwork done — and fast.”
Helping Doctors Manage Their Inboxes
Handling 75 to 100 patients emails per day means some aspect of that physician’s day will need to be sacrificed, whether that’s more in-person time with patients or, even, taking lunch. Even more challenging: Finding ways to manage those emails when a doctor wants to take vacation or time off and hopes to leave that email inbox behind to catch up and recharge with family or friends.
To combat email burnout, Baptist Health Medical Group, a healthcare system in seven different hospital markets around several states including Kentucky and Tennessee, started a unique pilot program this fall, known as Virtual Acute and Subacute Encounter Resource (VASER).
The virtual program is run by Reggie Lyell, MD, Epic physician liaison/special projects at Baptist Health in Louisville, Kentucky, alongside two part-time nurses and three virtual care nurse practitioners.
“If a doctor is busy, let’s say he or she is seeing 28 patients a day, which is quite common, he or she can tell the medical assistant to send emails to VASER to be handled,” he added. “Those messages then go to us to be triaged.”
The result: Office staff are less stressed, and physicians don’t have to wait until the end of the day — or use their evening — to reply to their patients.
“Instead, our physicians can spend time taking care of the patients sitting in front of them,” Lyell said. “When we were told by one doctor that he was finding that he spent 2 hours less on paperwork per day, we knew that this would prove to be a very important way to alleviate burnout.”
Ultimately, initiatives that streamline a physician’s office and handle tasks and procedures can reduce their burnout and improve their work-life considerably.
Lambeth Hochwald is a New York City-based journalist who covers health, relationships, trends, and issues of importance to women. She’s also a longtime professor at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute in New York City.
