| The issue
Enterprise wellness programs are built around the average employee, yet specialty teams in hospital settings do not fit this criteria. Their work carries higher acuity, less schedule predictability, more sustained exposure to patient suffering, and in many cases, a deeper administrative burden layered on top of clinical responsibility. When organizations measure and intervene at the enterprise level, they are prescribing the same treatment to patients with different diagnoses. A better way to measure
Team-level measurement starts with a different question. Rather than asking “how burned out are you?” It probes further with deeper intention, “How safe does this team feel raising concerns? Is there trust? Are people showing up as whole people, or are they just showing up?” These are the upstream indicators that predict downstream outcomes like turnover intention, error rates, patient satisfaction, and, naturally, burnout. Effective measurement requires granularity. It is structured around clinical units, specialties, and care environments, with enough resolution to distinguish a hospitalist service from an outpatient clinic, or even one inpatient team from another. The most useful systems incorporate a set of operationally relevant markers alongside well-being measures such as perceived staffing adequacy, workload intensity, EHR burden, after-hours work, and alignment with leadership priorities. A different starting point
The encouraging shift is that health systems making measurable progress on specialty burnout are moving away from one-size-fits-all solutions toward more nuanced, data-informed, and team-specific approaches. As organizations develop the ability to measure burnout at the specialty and unit level, they become better positioned to identify actionable drivers and deploy targeted interventions that match the true problem. Physician engagement is essential to design systems that work, and is no longer optional. The specialty teams that are still above the benchmark deserve more than an enterprise wellness program designed for someone else. They deserve measurement that wholly understands them at the team level, interventions tailored to their specific conditions, and a system that treats connection and psychological safety as operational infrastructure instead of a soft add-on. — By MedCity Influencers Lauren Fitzpatrick Shanks and Dr. Nathan Delafield |
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