AMA and Atalan Launch the PROGRESS Study: A New Standard for Physician Retention Research

Physician retention is no longer a “nice to have.” It is one of the highest-stakes operational problems in U.S. healthcare. On September 15, 2026, the American Medical Association and Atalan announced a research collaboration designed to treat it that way: as a measurable, system-level issue that can be studied with both physician voice and real-world operational data.

The initiative is called the PROGRESS Study — Physician Retention, Optimization, and Growth: Real-world Evidence and Sentiment Synthesis. It is a multi-site effort aimed at helping health systems understand what actually supports physician retention, workforce stability, and organizational performance.

Why this collaboration matters

Most retention programs still rest on incomplete evidence. Organizations survey physicians, track turnover after the fact, and then try to infer what went wrong. That approach misses two things:

1. How physicians feel about culture, efficiency, well-being, and the practice environment
2. How those perceptions line up — or fail to line up — with day-to-day operational reality

PROGRESS is built to close that gap. It will combine physician-reported data from the AMA Organizational Biopsy® with workforce and practice data from participating organizations, analyzed through Atalan’s Clinician Retention Intelligence (CRI) platform.

The Organizational Biopsy looks at four domains:

• Organizational culture
• Practice efficiency
• Self-care and personal well-being
• Retention

Atalan’s CRI platform looks at operational signals drawn from EHR, HRIS, and scheduling systems across seven domains:

• Messaging and communication
• Scheduling pressure
• Clinical workload
• EHR and documentation burden
• Team environment
• Personal characteristics
• Employment factors

Together, those two data streams can show where physician sentiment and operational reality diverge — and which patterns are associated with retention, patient access, and team performance.

The cost of getting this wrong

The financial case is already clear. The AMA estimates that physician turnover can cost an organization $500,000 to more than $1 million per physician once recruitment, onboarding, lost productivity, and related costs are included. Burnout remains a major driver of that turnover, with downstream effects on access, staffing stability, and organizational performance.

Those numbers are why retention can no longer sit only in HR or wellness. It belongs in strategy, operations, finance, and clinical leadership at the same time.

Tiffany Chan, CEO and founder of Atalan, put it directly: “Physician retention is one of the most pressing challenges facing health systems today. This collaboration creates an opportunity to generate meaningful evidence on how physician experience relates to workforce retention and organizational performance at scale.”

AMA President Willie Underwood III, MD, MSc, MPH, framed the same issue from the system side: “Health systems increasingly recognize that physician well-being, workforce stability, patient access, and organizational performance are closely connected. By bringing together physician perspectives and objective practice data, the PROGRESS Study aims to deepen understanding of the factors that shape the physician experience and influence long-term organizational success.”

What health systems should take from this now

PROGRESS will take time to produce published findings. Health systems do not need to wait for the final paper to act on the logic behind it.

1. Stop treating surveys and operations as separate worlds.
A physician can report a reasonably good culture while drowning in inbox volume, after-hours documentation, or unstable schedules. If those two pictures never meet, leaders will keep solving the wrong problem.

2. Measure retention risk earlier than resignation.
Turnover is a lagging indicator. Workload, documentation burden, scheduling pressure, and team conditions show up first. The organizations that retain physicians are the ones that intervene before a recruiter gets the call.

3. Connect retention to access and performance, not just “well-being.”
PROGRESS is explicit about this: retention is linked to patient access, team performance, and organizational success. That framing is useful internally. It moves the conversation from a wellness program to a core operating priority.

4. Build a shared language across well-being, medical staff, operations, and finance.
Culture, efficiency, self-care, and retention sit on one side. Workload, EHR burden, scheduling, and employment factors sit on the other. Leaders who can talk across both sides will make better decisions than those who own only one dataset.

The bigger shift

This collaboration is a signal. The field is moving from generic burnout commentary toward evidence that can tell a health system which conditions keep physicians and which conditions quietly push them out.

That is the right direction. Physician retention will not be fixed by another awareness campaign. It will be fixed by organizations that treat the physician experience as operational data — and then change the conditions that data reveals.

PROGRESS is one of the most promising attempts yet to make that evidence usable at scale. Health systems that want to stay ahead of the workforce crisis should watch this study closely — and start aligning their own internal data the same way.