Dr. Julie Ann Freischlag, the now-retired top executive of Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist, received a 45.6% increase in total compensation for fiscal 2024, raising her pay to $7.63 million, according to the nonprofit’s federal tax filing…
Advocate Health, parent company of Atrium Health and Baptist, provided the Winston-Salem Journal with two statements regarding its 2024 executive compensation…
Bradley Clark, treasurer, received $2.93 million in total compensation, up 85.4%. In December 2023, Clark was promoted to chief financial officer of Advocate Health.
Terry Williams, former chief strategy officer, was paid $2.45 million in total compensation, up 25.6%.
Dr. Ebony Boulware, who succeeded Freischlag as dean of Wake Forest University School of Medicine, had a total compensation of $1.75 million, up 83.3%
J. McLain Wallace Jr., general counsel, received $1.69 million in total compensation, up 65.7%.
Dr. David Zaas, in his 2024 role as Baptist’s president, received $1.35 million in total compensation, up 152.2%…
Advocate Health’s chief executive Eugene Woods saw a 39% raise in compensation to nearly $26 million in fiscal 2024 in his first year as his first year as the sole top executive of the nation’s third largest not-for-profit hospital system.
Woods’ overall compensation has skyrocketed from the $6 million he made in 2018. He also received a significant compensation increase following Atrium’s acquisition of Baptist in October 2020.
Dr. Joseph Varon, Brownstone Institute:
Doctors do not sacrifice years of their lives, miss holidays, destroy their sleep schedules, and carry this kind of emotional burden because they dream about maximizing throughput metrics or documentation compliance…
Somewhere along the line medicine changed. Hospitals changed. The language changed first because that is always how these transformations begin. Patients slowly became “throughput issues.” Beds became “capacity management.” Discharges became “flow optimization.” The ICU became “utilization.” Doctors became “providers.” Everything slowly started sounding less human and more operational. And eventually, hospitals stopped feeling like places centered around caring for human beings and started feeling like giant processing centers where movement itself became the priority.
Basically “Get them in,” “Get them out,” “Open the bed,” “Reduce the stay to maximize profit,” “Move the patient to an LTAC,” “Clear the ICU,” and so on.
Every hospital now has dashboards, graphs, throughput committees, operational targets, discharge metrics, and endless meetings about movement. Everything is about movement. Sometimes it feels like modern healthcare is one big revolving door. Patients come in one side, and everyone starts figuring out how quickly they can safely, or sometimes not so safely, move out the other side.
The strange thing is that many younger doctors probably think this is normal because it is the only medicine they have known. They inherited the system after it changed. Endless clicking. Mandatory modules. Documentation requirements. Throughput meetings. Insurance battles. Constant electronic interruptions. For them, this already feels like medicine…
The electronic medical record sped up much of this change more than people realize. Hospitals promoted the electronic medical record (EMR) as a big step forward. We were told it would improve communication, reduce mistakes, streamline work, and let doctors spend more time with patients. Now, that almost sounds like a joke. The EMR did not free doctors. It buried them.
Doctors now spend huge parts of their lives working with electronic systems, mostly designed by people who have probably never spent a night in an ICU. We click boxes, answer alerts, fill out required forms, meet compliance rules, and write notes that are more for billing, auditors, administrators, insurance companies, and lawyers than for patient care. You stop writing notes for physicians. You start writing notes for the machine. This changes people (clinicians) psychologically even if they do not recognize it immediately…
And through all of this chaos, doctors are somehow still expected to think clearly, compassionately, and deeply about human suffering…
(M)any physicians are not burned out. They are morally exhausted.
There is a big difference between being tired and slowly realizing that the profession you gave your life to no longer looks like the one you started in. That feeling builds up quietly over thousands of moments…
Rarely does somebody walk into a room demanding something obviously unethical. The pressure is subtle. Administrative. Financial. Constant. Eventually physicians begin anticipating institutional pressure before anybody even speaks it aloud. That is how systems shape human behavior most effectively. Not through force. Through environment…
Many doctors realized during Covid-19 that they were far less independent than they once believed. That realization changed some physicians permanently.
And honestly, I do not think medicine has emotionally recovered from that period yet…
When doctors spend more time serving systems than serving patients, medicine changes. When physicians are afraid to speak honestly, medicine changes. When throughput quietly shapes bedside decisions, medicine changes. When documentation matters more than human presence, medicine changes. And when physicians slowly begin feeling emotionally trapped inside giant institutional systems that they no longer control, we should probably stop calling that burnout because burnout does not adequately describe what many doctors now feel. It feels more like captivity.
Yes, change has come and it is, as best I can tell, it is not going away.
BTW, those salary figures are obscene.
It is interesting, Fred, that many of those hospital system executives are physicians. They are richly rewarded at the expense of the other physicians practicing throughout the system.
And then there is the issue of patients…
Also, Fred, as one reads the Brownstone Institute article, it is clear that “the system” has succeeded in reducing physicians to the level of reasonably well paid technicians. That has been an agenda item for a long time.