Burnout Requires Attention, Advocacy for Research & More

The Opening Session of ACR Convergence 2025 provided insight into burnout & highlighted advocacy efforts from key leadership

CHICAGO—Rheumatologists have a role in combating their risk of burnout, said Tait Shanafelt, MD, hematologist/oncologist and the Jeanie and Stew Ritchie Professor at Stanford University, Palo Alto, Calif., during the Opening Session of ACR Convergence 2025.

Dr. Tait Shanafelt

Dr. Shanafelt is also the chief wellness officer at Stanford Medicine and a well-known thought leader in the area of physician burnout. He has published more than 575 peer-reviewed papers and commentaries.

During his presentation, Dr. Shanafelt detailed factors that contribute to burnout among physicians and what organizations and individual clinicians can do to lower their risk of burnout.

He shared the experience of his mother, who recently died and was in hospice care during the last weeks of her life.

“This is obviously an area very familiar to me as an oncologist. And yet, I experienced it in a very different and personal way in that time as the hospice nurses and physicians supported our family,” Dr. Shanafelt said.

One major part of his experience was the impact of the nurses and physicians. He said, “They could only give because they themselves were well.” This statement illustrates why preventing burnout, when possible, is important.

A 2025 study led by Dr. Shanafelt found that 45.2% of physicians reported at least one symptom of burnout in 2023, which was lower than 2021, but still in line with earlier findings from 2011 (45.5%). (Note: This statistic was 62.8%, during the COVID-19 pandemic.) The study was based on a survey with more than 7,600 physician participants and a probability-based sample of the U.S. working population. In the survey, physicians were at a higher risk for burnout than other U.S. workers and less likely to be satisfied with their work–life integration.¹ 

Dr. Tait Shanafelt, with ACR President Dr. Carol Langford

Burnout Contributors

As Dr. Shanafelt outlined some of the major factors associated with burnout, he also acknowledged that the audience was likely well aware of those factors because they live it day to day.

Decreased time with patients, extra work with electronic health records (EHR), increased regulatory issues and more clinical demands all frequently contribute to health professional burnout, Dr. Shanafelt said.

Isolation is also a factor. It’s something Dr. Shanafelt said he added to a presentation slide in 2018, before the COVID-19 pandemic.

Of course, isolation has amplified even further since then for just about everyone. “We’ve all gotten busier spending more time documenting in the EHR and rubbing elbows with our colleagues less,” he said.

Another burnout contributor that one may not consider right away is the double-edged sword of common physician traits. Example: Most physicians are thorough, committed to their patients and recognize the responsibility that comes with patient trust. However, that also means they may have a hard time relaxing or allocating time for their family. They may have a sense that they aren’t doing enough, resulting in having a hard time setting limits or taking time off.

Some signs of burnout include seeing your patients or coworkers in a less-than-human way (also called depersonalization), emotional exhaustion, losing enthusiasm for your work and losing the sense that you’re making a difference at work.

Although it’s common to have those feelings sometimes, it’s when they occur frequently in one’s professional life that they indicate burnout. This risk also applies to others whose work involves intense contact with people, such as teachers, social workers and police officers, he said.

Facing professional burnout can become a big issue because of how it affects a person’s life professionally and personally, Dr. Shanafelt said. It can strain relationships and increase the risk for alcohol use and depression. Professionally, it can raise the risk of medical errors.

Pearls to Address Burnout

Dr. Tait Shanafelt at ACR Convergence 2025

It may be easy to say that physicians and other clinicians need to be tougher or more resilient, but they’re already a resilient group, Dr. Shanafelt explained.

“The current healthcare delivery system is burning out [some of] the most resilient human beings on planet Earth. So we won’t resilience our way out of this,” he said.

Dr. Shanafelt shared several pearls for rheumatologists and the organizations they work for to consider as they help to reduce burnout:

1. Think about what you enjoy most professionally, and try to do more of it: Is it teaching? Leadership? Learning? Something else? This activity may be something you haven’t considered much since the last time you were job searching when you likely had to do more self-reflection. It’s also possible that what excites you the most professionally has changed. “We can reflect on it, and then we can assess how much time we’re spending with that and what it might take to increase it,” he says;
2. Use executive coaching: Instead of focusing on healthy eating or exercise, executive coaching focuses on building leadership skills and working toward professional goals. Dr. Shanafelt’s research finds that executive coaching can help clinicians lower their burnout risk by getting them to evaluate what they find important;
3. Share your professional sacred moments with others: Think about those memorable moments in your job during which you’ve really made a connection with someone, perhaps a patient. You feel joy, peace or empathy. When this connection happens, do you usually share that moment with someone else? If not, start doing it, Dr. Shanafelt says. The mere act of sharing a sacred moment can help it resonate further and create more positive effects;
4. Consider using ambient AI note taking: Ambient AI note taking during an appointment may not be a perfect approach, but it may have some real advantages. This approach can include saving up to 20 minutes every four hours of seeing patients and decreased cognitive load, based on study results published earlier this year.² “In my own practice when I use this [tool], I find I’m able to pay attention to the patient. I don’t worry about tracking every detail of what they’re telling me,” Dr. Shanafelt said;
5. Start at the top: Health organizations should do more to address wellness, starting with leadership, Dr. Shanafelt said. This approach includes encouraging leaders to take care of their own mental and emotional health, providing a shared sense of purpose within the organization for team members and giving team members the chance to make suggestions for improvement; and
6. At the organizational level, find changes to make work life more efficient: He gives a surgical example. “If your ORs are taking too long to turn around, and the anesthesiologist, surgeon, and nursing OR team are all going home late and missing dinner, the solution is not to teach the surgeon to meditate between cases. It’s to get the room turned around,” he said. If many steps are needed to make workflow more efficient, start with one actionable step and then build out from there.

Both individual and systemic changes are needed to truly reduce burnout, Dr. Shanafelt said.

Setting the Tone

Also during the Opening Session, outgoing ACR President Carol A. Langford, MD, MHS, director of the Center for Vasculitis Care and Research in the Department of Rheumatic and Immunologic Diseases at Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland, welcomed attendees and encouraged their involvement with advocating for research funding and support.

“It is essential to rheumatology … to be able to shine brightly without the threat of being dimmed or extinguished,” Dr. Langford said.

Dr. Langford highlighted efforts from the ACR to advocate for the specialty, including more than 100 ACR, ARP and patient delegates who met with lawmakers and their staff over the past year to educate them about rheumatology.

“In these meetings, the ACR brought forward vital messages for our nation’s leaders to support National Institutes of Health funded research, preserve access to care for Medicare patients, oppose cuts to Medicaid and urge pharmacy benefit management reform to lower prescription drug costs and increase access to treatments for patients. As a result of these collective efforts, we have seen a number of successes where the voice of rheumatology has brought about change,” she said.

Dr. Langford, who’s term as ACR president finished on the last day of the meeting, urged members to become involved with advocacy efforts in 2026.

The Opening Session also included opening remarks from ARP President Adam Goode, PT, DPT, PhD, vice chair of clinical research and epidemiology in the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery and professor of orthpaedic surgery, Duke University, Durham, N.C.

Additionally, Liana Fraenkel, MD, MPH, who was ending her term as president of the Rheumatology Research Foundation, shared highlights from the foundation, which celebrates its 40th anniversary this year. Dr. Fraenkel is director of Patient Centered Population Health Research, Berkshire Health Systems, and an adjunct professor of medicine at Yale University School of Medicine in New Haven, Conn.

For details on the awards presented during the Opening Session, check out the following articles:

• 2025 ACR Awards of Distinction;
• 2025 ARP Merit Awards;
• 2025 ACR Masters; and
• 2025 ACR Distinguished Fellows.

Vanessa Caceres is a medical writer in Bradenton, Fla.

References

1. Shanafelt TD, West CP, Sinsky C, et al. Changes in burnout and satisfaction with work–life integration in physicians and the general U.S. working population between 2011 and 2023. Mayo Clin Proc. 2025 Jul;100(7):1142–1158.
2. Olson KD, Meeker D, Troup M, et al. Use of ambient AI scribes to reduce administrative burden and professional burnout. JAMA Netw Open. 2025 Oct 1;8(10):e2534976.