We are exploring the current state of hospitalist burnout and evolving roles in the post-pandemic landscape. We are seeking: • Hospitalists (MD or DO) currently practicing in the US, with firsthand experience of post-pandemic workflows. • Physicians (MD or DO) in the US who treat hospitalists and observe trends in burnout and role changes. Requirements: Willing to be quoted with full name, title, and affiliation; consent to light editing; and disclose conflicts of interest. Questions: 1. Based on your own experience or patient observations, how would you describe the current state of hospitalist burnout post-pandemic? Is it improving, holding steady, or worsening compared with peak pandemic years? 2. What are the most significant drivers of burnout for hospitalists right now — and have those factors shifted since 2020? 3. How have changes in hospitalist roles or workload (for example, hybrid coverage, increased patient acuity, or administrative demands) affected burnout risk? 4. What strategies or interventions — at the personal, team, or system level — have you seen make a measurable difference in reducing burnout? 5. If you could change one structural element of the hospitalist role to improve long-term sustainability and emotional well-being, what would it be?

1. Unlike in 2020, acute crisis stress has decreased, whereas there is still a lot of baseline burnout. The day is more predictable, but several hospitalists report a constant dragging exhaustion. It is not chaos so much as continual overload. 2. What drives it away the most now: high patient acuity, staffing gaps, heavy documentation/inbox work. The PPE scramble is a thing of the past, yet throughput pressure and nonclinical work have increased. Moral injury emerges when the time spent with patients continues to outweigh the clicks. 3. The nature of changes experienced: role changes such as hybrid/night tele-coverage, increasingly large teams to supervise, and the need to bridge inpatient care and outpatient gaps, further introducing context switches and handoffs to the equation. Boarding and offloading chokeholds lengthen days and overflow into after-hours. Even in cases where the census appears reasonably good on paper, fragmented workflows increase the risk of burnout. 4. What assists: forced census limits and admit restrictions, safe buffer staffing, and unit-based teams with brief huddles twice a day. EHR cleanup (fewer mandatory fields, clever phrases, in-basket triage) combined with scribes' high-traffic services decreasing after-hours charting. One suboptimal solution (that worked in one service): a discharge lounge nurse and an 11 a.m. discharge goal — late notes and weekend spillover decreased measurably. 5. What I would fix: Enforce patient caps and make them safe, as well as make acuity-based staffing the norm. Pay and schedule must also reflect non-RVU work (e.g., care coordination, teaching, in-basket). Foreseeable limits preserve the sustainability of the role and allow for time to focus on actual bedside care.