Joseph Varon, MD, chief of staff at Houston-based United Memorial Medical Center,hasn't had a day off since March, the Washington Post reported Dec. 12.

The COVID-19 pandemic has created a new set of ethical dilemmas for physicians this year, according to Medscape's 2020 Physician Ethics Report published Dec. 11.

Female surgeons are less likely to receive research funding from the National Institutes of Health than their male peers — and if they do receive a grant, it's smaller, according to a study published in JAMA Surgery.

At Stanford (Calif.) University School of Medicine, applications are up 50 percent, and at Boston University School of Medicine they're up 27 percent — a surge that admissions officers are calling the "Fauci effect," NPR reports.

An Oregon physician who publicly spoke out against wearing a mask to slow the spread of COVID-19 has had his medical license suspended, according to The Washington Post.

As an emergency room physician at Carmichael, Calif.-based Mercy San Juan Medical Center, Taylor Nichols, MD, has faced many hard shifts during the COVID-19 pandemic. But the virus was not to blame for a recent patient encounter that Dr. Nichols said was among the most challenging of his career, reports CBS affiliate KPIX.

There's ample opportunity to increase quality, improve the patient experience, and drive margin using value-based care, but organizations have to implement and scale the strategy properly to be successful.  

Knoxville, Tenn-based physician practice TeamHealth deployed clinicians to El Paso, Texas, as COVID-19 cases increased in the city, according to a company news release.

Many New Jersey officials are voicing concerns about staffing shortages as COVID-19 surges again across the U.S., reports the North Jersey Media Group.

During earlier months of the pandemic, hospitals were primarily concerned about whether they'd have enough ventilators to treat critical patients. Now, after devicemakers ramped up production to make more than 200,000 ventilators, there's plenty — but the new roadblock is a shortage of specialists who are trained to operate the complex machines, The New York Times reports. 

Novant Health and UNC Health are planning a UNC School of Medicine branch campus in Charlotte, N.C., the health systems said Nov. 19.

Baylor Scott & White Health and the Baylor College of Medicine have partnered to develop a four-year regional medical school in Temple, Texas, according to a Nov. 17 news release. 

Compared with other clinical and patient-facing roles in the acute care environment, physicians tend to have unique workflow needs in order to advance patient care. Disparate communication technologies will not typically meet these needs. Since physicians work across a multitude of units and facilities, they are often pulled in many different directions by colleagues in any number of departments. 

Nearly 88 percent of physicians who shared the same race or ethnicity as their patients received the maximum score on a patient experience survey compared to 82 percent from discordant pairs, according to a recent study published in JAMA Network Open. 

During an Oct. 28 webinar hosted by Becker's Hospital Review and sponsored by the American Medical Association, healthcare leaders from the AMA and Louisiana-based Ochsner Health discussed how health systems can look upstream for the drivers behind physician burnout. 

A new oath recited by first-year medical students at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine addresses racial injustice and misinformation, according to NPR.

Support staff at a New Jersey hospital were more likely to test positive for COVID-19 or virus antibodies compared to physicians and nurses, according to a study published in Open Forum Infectious Diseases. 

Many misconceptions still exist about osteopathic physicians and their abilities, despite these physicians receiving the same training and practice rights as peers who attend traditional medical schools, the American Medical Association and American Osteopathic Association said in a joint Nov. 4 statement. 

Burnout among physicians remains a crucial factor affecting healthcare settings in the U.S. A joint study released in 2019 by the American Medical Association, Stanford (Calif.) University School of Medicine and the Rochester, Minn.-based Mayo Clinic found 43.9 percent of physicians in this country exhibited at least one symptom of burnout in 2017, and burnout remains significantly higher among physicians than other U.S. workers.

Physicians with positive sleep disorder screening results were more likely to report burnout and low levels of professional fulfillment, according to a study published Oct. 30 in JAMA Network Open.