Healthcare is being redesigned in real time.
Artificial intelligence is already changing how we document, diagnose, and make decisions. EPIC which serves more than 3,700 hospitals worldwide now accounts for nearly 50% of the acute care market and draws on data from more than 325 million patient records. At its annual user group meeting, EPIC announced new AI tools and capabilities that sift through a patient’s medical records, unearthing subtle trends and comparing them across millions of patient encounters. This provides specific, actionable steps for physicians. Along with that, health systems are searching for new care models and financial pressures are forcing organizations to become more efficient.
In the middle of all this change, one voice needs to be increasingly present in the rooms where healthcare’s future is being decided: the physician’s.
I say that as someone who occupies two different seats. I am the CEO of a national physician practice, but I also continue to work across the Carolinas as a community emergency physician. One day I may be discussing strategy, technology or organizational performance. Another, I’m standing at the bedside trying to determine what a patient needs and how they can best navigate the crazy thing we call healthcare.
Those experiences have convinced me that physician leadership has never been more important.
We need translators
One of the greatest challenges in healthcare is translating strategy into clinical reality.
Too often, new technologies look good on paper but create friction when implemented. Or operational changes make sense on a spreadsheet but get in the way of clinicians actually providing care. Physicians who understand both medicine and business can help bridge that gap.
That doesn’t mean every hospital CEO needs to be a physician, nor does it mean physicians automatically make good executives. Clinical expertise and leadership expertise are different disciplines.
But healthcare organizations need physicians involved meaningfully in decisions about how care is designed, delivered and improved.
Physician leadership is also a workforce strategy
Despite recent improvement, physician moral injury (the more accurate term for burnout) remains an enormous challenge. The American Medical Association reported that 41.9% of physicians experienced at least one symptom of burnout in 2025. We should pay attention not only to that number, but to what it tells us. Moral injury is not simply an individual resilience problem. It is the signal that systems, workflows and expectations are making it harder for clinicians to do the work they entered medicine to do. It’s the canary in the coal mine.
Sometimes the most valuable thing a physician leader brings to an executive conversation isn’t another clinical opinion. It’s the ability to say, “Here is how this decision will actually feel on the front line.”
That perspective can influence everything from staffing and scheduling to technology adoption, compensation models and organizational culture.
It also helps build credibility with clinicians. People are more likely to embrace change when they believe the people designing it understand their work.
Leadership has to extend beyond the bedside
Medicine traditionally trains physicians to take responsibility for the patient in front of us. That responsibility remains sacred. But the challenges facing healthcare increasingly require physicians to think beyond individual encounters.
We need physicians willing to understand operations, finance, technology, reimbursement, and organizational leadership. We need them serving on committees, leading departments, building companies, advising health systems and, yes, sitting in the C-suite.
Because many of the decisions that ultimately determine the quality of a patient’s care are made long before that patient enters an exam room.
Healthcare’s next chapter will require extraordinary innovation. But innovation alone will not determine whether we succeed.
The real test will be whether we can translate that innovation into better care for patients and a more sustainable environment for the people providing it.
Physicians should help lead that work.
Credit: smolaw11, Getty Images
Yogin Patel, MD, MBA, FACEP, is Chief Executive Officer of ApolloMD, a physician-led, clinician-owned medical group that partners with hospitals and health systems nationwide.
Dr. Patel continues to practice emergency medicine, which he believes provides an important connection between clinicians, administrators, and patients. He is passionate about keeping patients and clinicians at the center of healthcare’s future. He earned his undergraduate degree, medical degree, and MBA from Duke University and completed his emergency medicine residency at Oregon Health & Science University, where he served as chief resident.
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