Healing the Heart of Healthcare: Reflections on the 2025 Ending Clinician Burnout Summit
The Ending Clinician Burnout Summit was hosted November 5th and 6th and is available on Demand.
By Megan Park, PharmD, MBA, Clinical Informatics & Innovation Pharmacist
The 2025 Ending Clinician Burnout Summit was more than a conference, it was a collective exhale, a gathering of leaders who believe that healing the people who heal others is not only possible, but essential. Over two days, clinicians, executives, educators, innovators, and wellbeing experts came together to name the crisis, challenge the status quo, and co-create a new vision for the future of medicine.
As a clinical pharmacist informaticist, I sit at the intersection of patient care, digital workflow design, and organizational strategy. Every session challenged me to think deeper about how systems, data, and empathy weave together. This summit reaffirmed something I have always believed: healthcare will be transformed not just through technology, but through humanity-centered design.
Below are my reflections, key insights, and the recommendations I believe can propel us forward.
Day 1: The Intersection of System Design and Human Experience
Day 1 explored burnout as a structural, cultural, and relational challenge, one requiring changes in how we lead, listen, measure, and design systems.
The Power of Reframing: Burnout Is Structural, Not Personal
Dr. Jonathan Fisher opened the summit with a grounding message: burnout is not an individual deficit, but a system design failure. This set the tone for a day that consistently reinforced one truth: we cannot solve burnout with individual resilience alone. We must redesign the environments clinicians work within.
As someone who builds clinical workflows and technology pathways, this resonated deeply. Design is destiny. And when we design without empathy, we create systems clinicians can survive, but not thrive within.
Data That Honors Humanity
Dr. Colin West delivered one of the most moving keynotes, reminding us that data must illuminate, not flatten, the human story behind the numbers.
As he said:
“Data must illuminate humanity.”
Burnout metrics are not simply dashboards, they are maps of human suffering and signals for where healing must begin.
As a pharmacist informaticist, I felt a renewed responsibility to ensure that the analytics I create reflect compassion, equity, and meaning, not just compliance.
Redesigning Care Through Equity, Storytelling, and Safety
Panels across the day emphasized three interlocking pillars:
Equity is a wellness issue. Burnout and inequity stem from the same structural fractures.
Art is activism. Jeremy Maldonado’s Disappearing Doctors reminded us that stories reach the heart faster than statistics.
Psychological safety is clinical safety. The Heart of Safety Coalition invited leaders to rethink safety from the inside out.
My biggest insight: the systems we build must protect dignity, not just data.
AI as a Tool for Healing, Not Surveillance
The closing Day 1 session (featuring Dr. Ed Lee and Stephanie Hines) sparked one of the most powerful quotes of the summit:
“Always be a student of someone else’s experience.” - Stephanie Hines
They reframed AI from productivity tool to restorative technology, using the “3Ps” (Problem, Planning, Partnership) to ensure artificial intelligence serves clinicians rather than burdening them.
This is perhaps the clearest informaticist takeaway: Technology’s success is measured in the sighs of relief it creates.
Day 2: The Internal Work of External Change
If Day 1 focused on systems, Day 2 turned inward, toward the emotional, psychological, and spiritual layers of burnout.
Burnout Is Not Just Exhaustion: It’s Disconnection
Dr. Russell Kennedy brought depth rarely heard on national stages. He argued that burnout is not simply overwork; it’s an internal fragmentation, a misalignment between adult self and inner child, between duty and humanity.
His framing was unforgettable:
“The burnout fix isn’t external. It’s internal.”
Day 2 reminded us that we cannot heal clinicians by repairing systems alone, we must help individuals reconnect with themselves.
Evidence-Based Tools for Well-Being
Between physical, mental, and emotional strategies, the summit offered a practical “toolbox”:
10 to 15 minutes of morning sunlight to reset cortisol
120 minutes per week of nature time (“25-3 Protocol”)
Micro-gratitude practices that reduce exhaustion within days
Heart-rate variability training for nervous system repair
Boundary setting as a form of self-compassion
Psychological first aid training (with over 500 referrals in one system)
It was healing to witness neuroscience, compassion, and leadership research converge so seamlessly.
Hope as Strategy
In a fireside session with Jen Fisher, she reframed hope not as wishful thinking, but as a structured, evidence-based leadership strategy.
Hope =
Clear goals
Pathways forward
A belief in one’s ability to reach them
Hope, it turns out, is operational.
As leaders, we either model hope, or create hopelessness.
A Special Highlight: Cultivating Self-Empathy in Healthcare: My Session
One of the most meaningful moments of the summit for me personally was having the opportunity to speak about a topic deeply embedded in my heart and in my work: self-empathy as a clinical skill. It was an honor to present on this topic with such an incredible team including: Janae Sharp (Founder, Sharp Index), Dr. Kate Berardi, and Dr. Quincy Snell.
In healthcare, we often talk about compassion, resilience, and self-care: but we rarely teach clinicians how to actually turn compassion inward. My session, “Cultivating Self-Empathy in Healthcare,” explored how self-empathy is not indulgence or softness, but a measurable, evidence-based pathway to reducing burnout, repairing nervous system overload, and restoring professional identity.
We introduced a structured 6-week self-empathy curriculum for healthcare professionals built on leading research from Kristin Neff, neuroscience frameworks for emotional regulation, and the practical realities of clinical work.
We explored:
The 6-step self-empathy process for navigating difficult emotions and moments of overwhelm
How to pause and anchor during stressful interactions
Self-compassion as a cognitive science, not a personality trait
Common humanity as an antidote to isolation
Mindfulness tools for creating space between stimulus and response
Real clinical scenarios involving medical errors, tough patient encounters, and compassion fatigue
One of the most powerful themes was this truth:
Healthcare professionals cannot extend true compassion to others while withholding it from themselves.
We discussed research showing that self-empathy and self-compassion practices reduce anxiety, depression, and burnout: while improving patient connection, decision making, and professional satisfaction. Self-empathy doesn’t pull us away from patient care. It restores the part of us that cares.
As a clinical pharmacist informaticist, I felt the weight of this session in a unique way. Informatics work is often invisible and high-stakes: filled with decisions that impact thousands of clinicians at once. The cognitive load is enormous. Self-empathy becomes not just a wellness tool but a leadership imperative:
To pause before reacting
To anchor before designing
To extend compassion to ourselves so we design systems that extend compassion to others
My hope is that this self-empathy framework becomes a core skill in healthcare training: as essential as pharmacology, documentation, or teamwork. Because if we want to heal the system, we must start by healing the people inside it.
Youth Mental Health and Clinician Burnout Are Linked
A staggering takeaway from Dr. Anderson’s session:
The youth mental health crisis is driving a secondary wave of clinician burnout, especially in primary care and pediatrics, where moral injury grows from the inability to connect families with timely psychiatric care.
One pediatrician cried when told a child psychiatry consult line was available at no cost.
This is what burnout really looks like: the heartbreak of not being able to help.
Coaching as a Prescription for Leadership
Dr. Sheree Johnson’s session on the real-world impact of coaching highlighted a powerful truth: Coaching isn’t a perk, it’s an essential piece of clinical leadership.
Her Mayo RCT showed a 17% reduction in burnout and 20% drop in emotional exhaustion.
Coaching is not therapy
It’s structured reflection
It’s psychological PPE
A Prescription Forward: Recommendations for Healing
Informed by the summit, I created a summary slide capturing the most actionable recommendations, both individual and systemic. Consider it a prescription forward:
For Clinicians
Charge your nervous system with morning sunlight
Restore awe, gratitude, and savoring (micro-doses count)
Practice self-compassion
Build reflective pauses into your day
Seek coaching as a leadership accelerator
For Organizations
Treat burnout as operational distress, not weakness
Build wellbeing into governance, metrics, and culture
Train leaders in psychological first aid
Create clinician co-design structures for all new workflows
Make human-centered design a standard of care
Use heatmaps and data to locate distress quickly
My Biggest Takeaway: Listening Is the New Leadership Standard
Across both days, one theme echoed louder than any other: Listening is the next revolution in healthcare.
Burnout is what happens when people feel unheard, unseen, and unsupported.
Healing begins when we become, as Stephanie Hines said:
“Students of someone else’s experience.”
As a pharmacist informaticist, I am walking away with a renewed calling: to ensure the systems we build honor the people who use them. To design not for efficiency alone, but for humanity. To operationalize empathy in code, workflow, analytics, and culture.
Because when we heal the healers, we heal the system. And when we heal the system, we change lives.