More physicians are retiring, and hospital leaders are focused on how to preserve institutional knowledge for younger generations.
“The idea of physicians retiring is relatively new,” Syed Raza, MD, vice president of medical operations at Baylor St. Luke’s Medical Center in Houston, told Becker’s. “In the past, before we had subspecialization, hospitalists or nocturnists, physicians owned their practices. It was their business, and they kept working until they simply couldn’t anymore. Retirement wasn’t about reaching age 60 or 65. Take my uncle, he was an internist who kept working until he passed away. That was the norm for baby boomer physicians.”
Here is how three leaders are handling physician retirements:
Debra Albert, DNP, RN. Chief Nursing Officer and Senior Vice President of Patient Care Services at NYU Langone Health (New York City): Experienced physicians are retiring at unprecedented rates, taking with them decades of clinical expertise and institutional memory. The collective wisdom of these healthcare professionals is an irreplaceable asset that healthcare organizations must deliberately preserve to maintain quality of care.
At NYU Langone, knowledge transfer has become a strategic priority. We’re exploring ways to capture and transmit the wisdom of seasoned practitioners to benefit newer clinicians, including leveraging AI and technology to make accumulated knowledge accessible at the point of care.
For nursing specifically, we’ve implemented formal succession planning at all leadership levels. Our approach began by understanding what success looks like within our organizational context — recognizing that while leadership skills may be transferable, there are nuances specific to our culture of excellence. Based on this understanding, we’ve built targeted curriculum to develop our future leaders.
This succession planning philosophy extends throughout our organization, as evidenced by our recent appointments of senior leaders who have risen through our ranks. By systematically preparing the next generation of clinical leaders, healthcare institutions can ensure continuity of exceptional care while honoring the legacy of those who have shaped modern medicine.
Valerie Leschber, MD. Chief Medical Officer at Cone Health (Greensboro, N.C.): When considering the ongoing and looming physician retirements, health systems must take a strategic and proactive approach to sustain high-quality care, because failing to address this shortage could worsen the ongoing “access” bottlenecks for patient care services.
I think it’s super important to focus on our provider pipeline, especially physicians but also our APPs, which requires partnership with our surrounding educational programs. This includes medical school and residency partnerships as well as PA and NP programs for preceptorship and training. Health systems need to also connect with college level students and high school students to develop interest in health sciences and medical fields as future career opportunities.
In the life cycle of our provider workforce, once trained and recruited, we must remain vigilant about what will keep new physicians engaged with their profession and active in their practice by investing in them personally and professionally. Competitive compensation is of course a large component of this investment. And we also need to provide innovative technology and evolving AI tools for medical practice and decision support to make the fast-paced and demanding work of being a physician more manageable. Internal to the health system, use of physician mentorship and leadership development programs can also create formalized structure for building resiliency of the organizational culture and institutional wisdom among physicians that makes the organization unique.
Lastly, I believe the future of value-based care delivery requires us to accelerate the use of team-based models that expand collaboration and responsibility among various clinical roles of the care team to distribute the workload of health care more efficiently. Doing this will help ensure our physicians, today and tomorrow, are performing at the most appropriate level of their skill set and training across the board.
Syed Raza, MD. Chief Medical Officer at Baylor St. Luke’s Medical Center (Houston): The number one thing is the institutional knowledge that physicians gain after being with an institution for a long time. It’s definitely a generational thing, and we see it especially in those getting close to retirement. Generation X physicians are getting closer to retirement: Some are ready to retire, especially after the pandemic, once they have enough saved. But many of us still want to practice.
Those of us who’ve practiced for 20-plus years accumulate significant institutional knowledge — knowledge that’s hard to replace. Things like the history of a service line, past pitfalls in expanding it, or safety concerns related to specific products. Those insights are critical to running a hospital or health system.
I think a lot of physicians may retire from day-to-day patient care, but they’re still interested in lending their expertise through consulting or similar roles. We’re seeing more physicians enter consulting toward the end of their careers, and that’s a resource we should tap into.
Like in nursing, where there’s a clinical ladder, there’s also a progression path for physicians to get involved in leadership roles. Younger physicians today tend to prioritize work-life balance more than Gen X did, which is a good thing and can help reduce burnout in the long run.
We encourage them to get involved in hospital leadership so there’s an exchange of institutional knowledge. That involvement is crucial. It’s essentially a form of mentorship — engaging them in quality committees, the medical executive committee, even the board — so they can see how things work at the system level. That exposure helps them think about strategy, quality, and safety holistically, beyond just their individual patients.
