U.S. physician burnout falls, yet gaps persist across specialties: AMA
WASHINGTON, UNITED STATES — Physician burnout in the United States declined for a third consecutive year, according to new American Medical Association data, but uneven progress across specialties is pushing health systems to weigh structural fixes — including outsourcing non-clinical workloads — to ease the administrative load still driving doctors out of the profession.
Burnout eases, but hospital-based specialties lag
The AMA surveyed thousands of physicians and found that 41.9% reported at least one burnout symptom in 2025, down from 43.2% in 2024 and 48.2% in 2023. The association credited the improvement to employer efforts to lift job satisfaction.
Progress, however, has not been uniform. Emergency medicine practitioners posted the highest burnout rate at 49.8%, followed by urological surgeons at 49.5%, hematology and oncology specialists at 49.3%, and obstetricians and gynecologists at 45.7%.
On the lower end, infectious disease, nephrology, dermatology and psychiatry ranged between 23% and 32%.
The survey, drawn from nearly 19,000 responses across 38 states and 106 health systems, also showed that hospital-based specialties scored below average on job satisfaction and related well-being measures.
“These data make clear that improving physician well-being isn’t one-size-fits-all,” AMA President Dr. Bobby Mukkamala said in a statement, urging health system executives to accelerate work on specialty-specific drivers of burnout.
Offloading non-clinical work emerges as a relief valve
For hospitals and clinics, the pressure to act is mounting. Burnout is tied to higher turnover, poorer care quality and lower patient satisfaction, and it continues to worsen the country’s physician shortage.
The AMA noted that doctors spend more than half of their workdays entering patient visits into electronic health records, a grind it described as “click fatigue.”
Administrative burden is where many providers see the clearest room to move. Health systems are piloting AI scribes to draft clinical notes, though the AMA flagged mixed evidence on reliability and ongoing concerns about errors.
Outsourcing non-clinical functions — medical coding, billing, prior authorization, transcription, data entry and back-office support — is emerging as a parallel lever.
Shifting documentation-heavy and repetitive tasks to dedicated offshore teams can return clinical hours to physicians, directly addressing the specialty-specific strain the AMA identified.
With the second Trump administration less engaged in burnout and retention than its predecessor, the onus has landed on health systems themselves. For providers weighing next steps, structural changes that pull paperwork out of the exam room may offer the fastest path to relief.
