Rex Hoffman, M.D., on physician burnout and collaborative leadership | HSES 2026

Physician shortages and burnout are the most underestimated of the pressures facing health systems and payers, according to Rex Hoffman, M.D., MBA, chief medical officer at Providence Holy Cross Medical Center in Los Angeles. Hoffman spoke with Managed Healthcare Executive at the 2026 Health System Executive Summit.

Vacancy rates and recruitment are visible, Hoffman said, but the downstream effects are not: delayed care, reduced capacity and increased turnover, all of which have significant consequences for how care is delivered. He pointed to American Medical Association data showing that 41.9% of physicians reported burnout in 2025, a figure he called “very alarming.”

Hoffman said he is active in this area and pointed to the AMA’s Joy in Medicine program as a resource for reducing burnout. At Providence Holy Cross, he regularly meets with the hospital’s physicians. After seven and a half years in this work, he said, he knows which physicians are more prone to burnout, and he checks in with them often to get a sense of where they are and offer services if they want them.

Hoffman also argued that leadership needs to become more collaborative, transparent and patient-centered as healthcare grows more complex and expensive, and that organizations too often treat those ideas as value statements rather than practices. A hospital shouldn’t promote collaboration “just by scheduling meetings,” he said. Instead, it needs shared decision-making among key stakeholders, who are then held accountable for those decisions.

He outlined three shifts. The first is moving from siloed decision-making to shared accountability, for example through an executive clinical operations council whose members make decisions together and answer for them. The second is moving from selective reporting to transparent performance, with stakeholders agreeing on a dashboard of what matters and sharing it regularly across the facility and at board meetings, “so that people are all on the same page and highlight the same things.” The third is involving patients in designing their care, such as asking for their input on discharge instructions so those instructions are more acceptable and more likely to be followed.

In this video, Hoffman discusses why burnout deserves more attention from leadership and how organizations can