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Are your doctors leaving your healthcare organization for another hospital? Are they even staying in the country? The answer may surprise you.
Attrition rates among physicians are rising, across all specialties, practice settings, and genders, even as the physician shortage accelerates. While many doctors are leaving clinical practice altogether, others are thinking about leaving the country to practice elsewhere. Physician scheduling may be instrumental in keeping doctors in their clinical practice.
There are currently more than a million physicians practicing in the United States, according to statistics published in August 2025 by the Federation of State Medical Boards (FSMB). While the total number of licensed physicians has grown since 2010, the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) predicts the nation will be short about 86,000 physicians by 2036.
A recent survey published in Medscape explored the reasons some doctors are taking their medical practice abroad, and the results might surprise you. An astonishing 70% of those surveyed named quality of life/work-life balance as their reason for leaving. This beats a number of other factors, including:
• Higher compensation
• Better education/lifestyle for their families
• Professional growth
• An opportunity to experience a different culture
Clearly, a life/work-life balance is an important – if not the most important – factor in keeping doctors happy and in their current practice.
How to Attract and Retain Your Physicians by Improving Life/Work-life Balance
Reduce administrative burden
Dealing with a mountain of non-clinical tasks ratchets up the risk of burnout, stress, and worsening care. These non-clinical tasks can include prior authorizations, documentation, and quality reporting. Reducing administrative burden can give doctors more time with their patients, and improve job satisfaction.
Look for ways to reduce administrative burden, such as:
• Optimizing your EHR system
• Delegating tasks to other healthcare professionals
• Leveraging technology to improve communication, documentation, and reminders
Empower patients
Empowering your patients can help improve the life/work-life balance of the physicians in your healthcare organization. Participating in their own care gives patients a better understanding of their conditions; it also helps them make informed decisions and adhere to treatments more closely.
Ways to empower patients include:
• Online portals
• Website blogs and pages that provide health information, using easy-to-understand language
• Connecting them to support network
Implement flexible scheduling
Flexible scheduling helps clinicians manage their time and improve their life/work-life balance. Exceptional shift scheduling software allows physicians to swap shifts, print schedules that look like conventional calendars, avoid long or irregular shifts, receive notifications of changes to the current schedule, and get reminders through text messaging and emails.
Benefits of flexible scheduling include:
• Control over work schedules without leaving the hospital/organization under- or over-staffed
• Reduced fatigue associated with irregular or excessively lengthy shifts, or too many
consecutive shifts• Creating an environment of fairness
ByteBloc is one of the best ways to alleviate physician stress, mitigate burnout, and reduce attrition in your healthcare organization. For more information about reducing physician shortages through innovative technology, contact ByteBloc. We’ve been providing emergency medicine scheduling since 1989, but we also help with scheduling physicians of every specialty.
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