Eight leaders joined Becker’s to discuss how sidelining clinician voices can lead to burnout, misaligned strategy and missed opportunities to improve care.
Question: What happens when leaders don’t listen to clinicians?
Editor’s note: These responses were edited lightly for clarity and length.
Doug Curran, MD. Former President of the Texas Medical Association and Family Medicine Physician at East Texas Community Clinic (Athens): When leaders don’t listen to clinicians, patients don’t receive the care that centers around them. Rather, the economics and business of medicine become the focus. Patients are what healthcare is all about. Real doctors put patients first and commit themselves to what’s best for them. Our profession must be patient-centric to best provide the healthcare our people deserve.
Pat Keel. CFO of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital (Memphis, Tenn.): Several bad things can happen when leaders don’t listen to clinicians. The consequences of not listening show up quickly — burnout increases, trust erodes and well-intentioned strategies fail at the bedside. Decisions made without clinical input can often create inefficiencies, safety risks and frustration for the very teams responsible for delivering care.
Over time, this can cause clinicians to disengage, which stalls innovation and damages the organization’s credibility with their workforce. Perhaps most concerning, patients can feel the impact through fragmented care and missed opportunities to improve quality. Listening to clinicians isn’t about consensus on every decision — it’s about respecting expertise, understanding real-world implications, and building solutions that actually work in practice. Communication and transparency can go a long way in collaborating with clinicians to make the best decisions.
Richard Lofgren, MD. President and CEO of University of Oklahoma Health (Oklahoma City): When physicians say something is adversely affecting patient care and you don’t listen, you are effectively putting patients at risk. The key for leadership is being able to distinguish the essential from the “nice to have” — to recognize what is truly threatening to patient safety versus what is simply a personal preference. That is a distinction you cannot afford to miss if you want to maintain a safe, high-functioning clinical environment.
Meena Mallipeddi. CEO of AmplifyMD (Los Gatos, Calif.): More often than not, they then miss the mark. They invest in solutions that may look strong on paper, but don’t fit the realities of care delivery — so they create extra steps, new workarounds and inconsistent adoption. The result is predictable: clinicians disengage, performance varies by site and shift and technology becomes another source of friction instead of a force multiplier.
That’s exactly why we treat clinician input as a prerequisite, not a post-launch check-the-box. We build a tight feedback loop with frontline users and clinician leaders to inform not only how the platform should function, but whether certain features should exist at all. When clinicians help define what gets built, technology becomes easier to use, adoption accelerates and improvements are measurable in throughput, quality and the clinician experience.
Patrick McEneaney, DPM. Owner and CEO of Northern Illinois Foot & Ankle Specialist (Crystal Lake): We know that physicians are on the front line of healthcare, where administration often has a bird’s-eye view. Administration is really good at finding trends. The concern is that these trends may be captured on monthly, quarterly or annual reports. They are then discussed at a later meeting, which creates more of a reactionary approach to solving problems. Physicians see this in real time, not in a report in the future. We are able to anticipate trends in patient care, the customer experience and concerns in the healthcare industry because of our daily experiences. When hospitals don’t listen to clinicians, they lose this whole perspective. It is an important piece of the healthcare puzzle.
Beau McNeff. CEO of Weiser Memorial Hospital (Idaho): When leaders don’t listen to clinicians, we can miss the mark on decisions. Aside from the normal impact of disengaging folks from not listening, the perspective that clinicians bring is unique. They are at the front lines talking with patients, employees, and dealing with the EMR and other systems. Clinicians inherently want to help the organization because that helps the patients they serve. So, even if we disagree, we should hear it out from a place of genuine care for our patients.
Alan Sickles, MD. CEO of Prime Healthcare’s Saint Michael Medical Center (Newark, N.J.): When clinical voices are not meaningfully integrated into leadership, gaps emerge between strategy and care delivery. Patient safety can be compromised, improvement initiatives may fail to gain traction, and workforce morale can suffer when decisions do not reflect the realities of patient care. Over time, this disconnect can erode trust and weaken outcomes for the communities hospitals are meant to serve.
Prime’s physician-led model is designed to prevent that. By ensuring physicians and frontline caregivers help shape strategy and operations, we have been able to strengthen struggling hospitals and achieve nationally recognized performance in safety, quality, and patient outcomes. Listening to clinicians is not optional; it is essential to delivering compassionate, high-quality care and sustaining community hospitals for the long term.
Erik Summers, MD. CMO of Medical University of South Carolina’s Division of Hospital Medicine (Charleston): Leadership 101 is listening to the people you serve. I’ve never met a great leader who didn’t know how to listen. In medicine, we say that if you listen to the patient, they will tell you their diagnosis the majority of the time. It is the same with clinicians. Clinicians will tell you what is wrong and how to fix it in most cases. You just have to listen.
Leaders have to make the best decisions possible. I prefer to add the clinicians’ frontline advice rather than make the decision alone. Multiple brains tend to be better than one.
