Forty-Four Percent of Physicians Have Considered Quitting Since January. DPC Data Shows the Opposite Trend.

Analysis by DPC Insider
#physician burnout#workforce#practice sustainability#DPC trends#primary care shortage
Sources: Sharp Rise in Retirements, Thoughts of Leaving Medical Practice · National Physician Burnout Survey · Hint Health Releases 2026 Direct Primary Care Trends Report: Data Shows DPC Has Moved From Niche Alternative to National Healthcare Infrastructure · US Primary Care Workforce Growth: A Decade of Limited Progress, and Projected Needs Through 2040 · Physician Burnout in 2026: What Mental Health Month Reveals About a System Under Strain

The burnout rate is falling. The departure rate is not.

MedCentral’s 2026 Evolution of Medical Practice survey found that 44 percent of physicians have considered leaving medical practice since the start of this year — up from 35 percent in last year’s survey. Nine points in twelve months. The clinical practice of medicine didn’t get measurably more dangerous or physically demanding in that window. Something else shifted.

The Divergence Worth Paying Attention To

The American Medical Association’s national burnout data points in a different direction. By the AMA’s measure, physician burnout has declined for four consecutive years. In 2025, 41.9 percent of physicians reported at least one burnout symptom — a real improvement from 43.2 percent in 2024 and from the 62.8 percent peak during the pandemic.

So burnout is falling. Departure intent is rising. That’s not a contradiction — it’s a signal that they’re measuring different things.

Burnout, in the clinical sense, often reflects acute emotional exhaustion: the tank running dry after sustained stress. The AMA’s declining numbers may reflect genuine recovery from the worst of the pandemic crisis. But departure intent tracks something else — the structural conditions that make a job feel worth doing long-term. Conditions that don’t improve just because the acute crisis passes.

What Physicians Say Is Actually Driving It

Barton Associates, tracking burnout through Mental Health Month this May, found that excessive administrative tasks — documentation leading, prior authorization close behind — continue to top every survey of what’s pushing physicians toward the exit. Not the clinical work. Everything surrounding the clinical work.

A primary care physician in a traditional fee-for-service practice might carry a panel of 1,500 to 2,000 patients. That math requires 15-minute appointments to see enough patients to meet revenue targets. What doesn’t fit in 15 minutes: reviewing overnight lab results, clearing the message queue, completing referral paperwork, handling the prior authorization flagged at 4 p.m. for a medication the patient has taken for three years without issue.

That’s not burnout in the acute clinical sense. That’s structural friction that compounds every day, and it doesn’t improve when a physician sleeps better or takes a week off. It’s there when they return.

The MedCentral departure number rising while the AMA burnout number falls is consistent with physicians recovering from exhaustion but still looking at their working conditions and concluding they don’t want to continue.

What DPC Practices Are Reporting

Hint Health’s 2026 Direct Primary Care Trends Report, released in April and drawing on data from more than 2,700 clinicians and 1.4 million members across the platform, documented a 48 percent reduction in clinician burnout among DPC physicians. That’s a large difference, and it’s not surprising when you look at the structural differences involved.

DPC physicians typically carry panels of around 500 patients — roughly a quarter of the conventional load. The subscription model removes the per-visit billing cycle, eliminating the coding question attached to every encounter. There are no insurance prior authorizations because there’s no insurance claims workflow. Appointments run 30 to 60 minutes as a standard, not as an exception carved out for complex cases.

The Hint report also documented that employer-sponsored DPC rates have remained stable in the $55 to $65 per member per month range for five consecutive years, even as traditional premium costs have climbed 7 to 9 percent annually. That financial stability matters for physician sustainability too: a practice that isn’t optimizing volume-based reimbursement isn’t pressured to optimize every 15-minute slot.

These aren’t cultural differences. They’re structural ones. The practice of medicine is the same. The work surrounding it is profoundly different.

The Workforce Math Gets Harder

If 44 percent of physicians have considered leaving medicine in a single year, the downstream arithmetic is uncomfortable. Researchers projecting primary care workforce needs through 2040 have estimated that an additional 57,559 primary care clinicians will be needed — driven by population aging and growth, not by the departure trends that were just starting to surface when that research was conducted.

A physician who exits medicine is a physician not available to absorb the patients of a colleague who retires, not mentoring residents, not holding a practice in a community with one or two primary care options. The gap between projected supply and projected demand widens every year that departure intent runs ahead of recruitment.

Direct primary care practices account for fewer than 3,000 practices nationwide out of several hundred thousand primary care physicians. The DPC model isn’t going to single-handedly resolve a 57,000-clinician shortage. But DPC membership has grown 837 percent since 2017 — and it’s growing in part because the physicians entering it are not the ones MedCentral is counting in the departure-intent column.

What This Means

The two surveys — AMA and MedCentral — are measuring different phenomena, and taken together they describe a healthcare workforce in a specific kind of trouble. Physicians are less acutely burned out than they were three years ago. They’re also more likely to be thinking about leaving. The structural conditions that make traditional practice unsustainable haven’t kept pace with the post-pandemic emotional recovery.

DPC’s structural differences — smaller panels, direct patient relationships, administrative simplicity — address the conditions in the MedCentral survey more directly than any wellness initiative. The physicians DPC attracts are often precisely those who ran the calculation on traditional practice and found the math didn’t work anymore.

For communities and patients, that’s worth watching. Every physician who migrates to DPC takes that calculation with them — which means the shortage projected for 2040 may be arriving on an accelerated schedule, and the model designed to keep physicians practicing longer is the same one that has historically been hardest to scale.

The DPC Summit opens in New Orleans on July 16. It’s a reasonable bet that departure intent and workforce sustainability will be somewhere in the conversations happening there.