OBGYN Burnout
Let's talk about it.
We spend a lot of time talking about physician burnout, especially in obstetrics and gynecology. The conversation usually centers on wellness, resilience, or work-life balance.
We think that’s looking at the problem backward.
OB-GYN has never been an easy specialty. It asks physicians to be surgeons, primary care providers, laborists, counselors, and emergency responders—sometimes all in the same day. The hours are unpredictable, the emotional stakes are high, and patients deserve nothing less than exceptional care.
None of that is new.
What’s changed is the business of practicing medicine.
Today, OB-GYNs are expected to do more administrative work, absorb more financial risk, navigate increasingly complex reimbursement models, and practice in one of the most litigious specialties in medicine—all while reimbursement struggles to keep pace with the actual cost of providing care.
Burnout isn’t happening because physicians suddenly became less resilient. It’s happening because we’ve made the job fundamentally harder to sustain.
Consider the economics of obstetrics. A physician may spend nine months caring for a pregnant patient, be on call nights and weekends, deliver a baby at 3 a.m., manage postpartum care, and then receive a single global payment intended to cover much of that work. At the same time, a large share of births are reimbursed through Medicaid, which often pays significantly less than commercial insurance, while malpractice premiums remain among the highest in medicine.
It’s not difficult to see why many physicians eventually make a practical decision: stop delivering babies.
Many continue practicing gynecology, where schedules are more predictable, malpractice exposure is generally lower, and reimbursement is often easier to manage. Others narrow their practice, become hospital employees, or leave clinical medicine altogether.
Those decisions make sense for individual physicians.
Collectively, they’re devastating.
The United States is already facing a shortage of OB-GYNs, and roughly half of U.S. counties are considered maternity care deserts. As more physicians step away from obstetrics, patients travel farther for prenatal care, wait longer for appointments, and lose access to local labor and delivery services.
Burnout isn’t just affecting physicians.
It’s reshaping access to maternal healthcare.
Administrative work only compounds the problem. Documentation requirements continue to grow. Prior authorizations consume clinical time. Patient messages spill into evenings and weekends. None of these tasks independently explains why physicians leave the profession, but together they create constant friction. According to ACOG, between 40% and 75% of OB-GYNs experience some form of professional burnout, and recent AMA data continue to rank obstetrics and gynecology among the specialties with the highest levels of occupational stress.
We don’t think the answer is simply telling physicians to become more resilient.
We think the answer is removing unnecessary work.
That starts with better systems — not AI slop or technology that creates another dashboard, another inbox, or another workflow, but technology that eliminates work and adds care capacity. Documentation should happen during the encounter, not after dinner. Information should be available without searching through multiple systems. Administrative tasks that don’t require clinical judgment shouldn’t require a physician’s time.
AI won’t solve malpractice reform. It won’t fix reimbursement policy or expand residency funding. Those are structural challenges that require policy change.
But it can solve something much more immediate: the hours physicians lose every week to work that doesn’t improve patient care.
Healthcare often talks about physician shortages as though they’re inevitable. We don’t see it that way.
If we want more physicians to continue practicing obstetrics, we have to make practicing obstetrics sustainable again. That means addressing reimbursement, liability, administrative burden, and the design of the tools clinicians use every day.
Burnout is the outcome we see.
The system that produces it is where we should focus our attention.