At HCA Healthcare, success with physician recruitment and retention is far more than a numbers game. It is the result of an approach fueled by listening, leadership and innovation.
For the Nashville, Tennessee-based health system, that includes making use of augmented intelligence (AI) tools that reduce physician burdens, training more than 5,400 resident and fellow physicians across the nation, and embedding physicians in every facet of its business decision-making. With 190 hospitals, more than 2,500 care sites across 20 states, and care delivered by over 44,000 physicians, HCA Healthcare’s leaders are working to build something bigger than a top-notch physician workforce—they are on a mission to create a professional culture that works for doctors and delivers for patients.
HCA Healthcare is constantly searching for ways “to create a culture that is very supportive of our physicians,” said Pranav Mehta, MD, the chief medical officer at HCA Healthcare. Doing so is an essential part of meeting the health system’s goal of being “the premier health care organization in the country.”
This hard work is getting some outside recognition. Notably, HCA Healthcare recently was named one of the 2025 World’s Most Admired Companies by Fortune. Additionally, 33 HCA Healthcare hospitals earned spots on the 2025 Premier 100 Top Hospitals list published in Fortune.
Such recognition means a lot, because it indicates that “outside agencies have analyzed information about the care we deliver and quantitatively ranked us among the top in the industry against our peers,” said Randy Fagin, MD, the chief quality officer at HCA Healthcare.
The efforts that have yielded such recognition go back to delivering on the priority of patient care.
“Across HCA Healthcare’s 43 diverse markets—from smaller, rural areas to large cities—we partner with physicians and utilize our scale to improve systems of care and deliver the best possible outcomes for our patients,” said Dr. Mehta, an internist who has held physician leadership positions at HCA Healthcare for more than a dozen years.
“Our founders were physicians who envisioned a health care company with the scale, resources, and clinical expertise to provide patient-focused, high-quality care in service to the community,” said Dr. Fagin, a renowned robotic surgeon who has lead quality improvement efforts across medical device and health care delivery industries.
“Nearly 60 years after our founding, that focus remains at the core of what we do and why we do it” he added.
HCA Healthcare is a member of the AMA Health System Program, which provides enterprise solutions to equip leadership, physicians and care teams with resources to help drive the future of medicine.
Over 5,400 physicians in training
During Match Week in March, HCA Healthcare offered over 2,100 residency positions and filled more than 98% of the available spots. This was “an all-time high for our residency and fellowship programs, suggesting that there’s demand to be trained at a large, efficient, reputable health system like ours,” said Juan Sanchez, MD, the chief academic officer of graduate medical education (GME) at HCA Healthcare.
“We have developed the largest GME platform in the country as a crucial physician pipeline strategy," said Dr. Sanchez, a cardiothoracic surgeon. “We have the ability to recruit top medical students to our programs in a broad set of specialties, train them as native to our clinical delivery models, and retain as many as possible within our clinical environments.”
“Our growth trajectory, which began in earnest during the 2014–2015 academic year, has been a key solution to the projected physician shortage," he said.
Where should all those residency positions be situated across HCA Healthcare’s massive footprint? And what kind of specialty training should be offered? Those are key questions that are answered “at the intersection of quality and the needs of each of the communities we serve,” said Dr. Fagin.
“We offer an expanding variety of residencies and fellowship positions at 79 teaching hospitals across 16 states, continually monitoring the projected demand to calibrate our portfolio of graduate medical education programs,” Dr. Sanchez added.
Work to leverage technology
Looking back to the 1968 founding of HCA Healthcare, Dr. Fagin said the health system has “always been a company that is focused on the physician voice as a key component to delivering the highest quality of care.”
What does that entail? According to Dr. Fagin, “it means bringing our physicians forward in the process, so when it comes to decisions that impact their ability to care for patients, they are part of those decisions. It is about embedding our physicians in the decisions that ensure we provide the right environment for patient care, dedicate the right resources for supporting that care, and enable innovations that helps us create tomorrow’s standards.”
HCA Healthcare is “very invested in new technologies so that it’s easier for physicians to practice,” Dr. Mehta added, noting that the health system takes a strategic approach to health care AI, digital transformation and innovation because “these things are not only better for delivering care, but they also make our hospitals better for physicians to practice in.”
For example, “we’re working to leverage technology as a vehicle for reducing the administrative burden on physicians,” Dr. Fagin said. “Additionally, there are areas of clinical decision support where that same kind of backend technology can empower our physicians with the information they need to make the best clinical decisions in the moment.”
“HCA Healthcare’s physicians are given the critical information they need to make the right decisions. It’s about more than the raw facts. It’s about providing them with insights into patterns and trends,” he said. “We’re investing heavily in this space to make sure that our clinical leaders, physicians and nurses alike, have the tools they need to make the best decisions possible for our patients.”
“Keeping the patient at the center of all we do is critical,” said Dr. Fagin. “So, when we invest in technology, when we invest in these resources, the benefit to the patient is always at the center of that decision.”
For example, “we’re embedding this technology and AI in the care of the patients who have a stroke,” said Dr. Mehta. “We’ve used AI technology that sits on top of our imaging technology, and if a patient presents with a stroke, it immediately is able to recognize it and sends a message to not only the radiologist, but also the care team alerting them that this patient has a large vessel occlusion.”
“When it comes to caring for patients with a stroke, we say that ‘time is brain,’” he explained. “This technology is integrating into already existing workflows, helping physicians make prompt, informed decisions to improve patient outcomes.”
From AI implementation to EHR adoption and usability, the AMA is fighting to make technology work for physicians, ensuring that it is an asset to doctors—not a burden.
Focus on physician well-being
“Another key area of focus at HCA Healthcare is physician well-being to complement our recruitment, training, and retention efforts,” Dr. Sanchez said. “One part of that work is our Physician Wellness Research Lab devoted to studying and enabling scientifically-based approaches to well-being to help residents balance the demands of the job with the resources they need to be successful.”
"HCA Healthcare collaborates with organizational psychologists at Claremont Graduate University in California to support research on resident and fellow wellness across all of HCA’s clinical working and learning environments,” he said. “These experts are examining how physicians-in-training can perform their duties most effectively while fostering meaning, a sense of belonging and a strong affinity to our organization, ultimately resulting in great patient care and work-life balance.
“This transformative approach has enabled us to continue recruiting and retaining the best physicians possible," Dr. Sanchez added.
Such investments, taken together, represent “the secret sauce of why our residency and fellowship programs are in such high demand,” he said, noting that the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) “conducts a wellness survey every year. Through our focus on wellness, HCA Healthcare trainees beat the national average on all 12 of the items on ACGME’s well-being survey for the 2023–2024 academic year.”
The AMA GME Competency Education Program delivers education to help institutions effectively meet ACGME common program requirements. The program provides an award-winning virtual experience, with quality education designed for residents on the go. It’s easy to use, saves time and cuts administrative burdens with simple reporting tools. Learn more.
Invest in leadership development
A key pillar for HCA Healthcare is also physician leadership development and advocacy, Dr. Mehta said, noting that the health system has a Physician Leadership Academy, which is “a training academy for those physician leaders who are interested in leadership opportunities.”
For 2024, the Physician Leadership Academy welcomed 36 chief medical officers from across HCA Healthcare and expanded to include a broader range of programs aimed at developing physician leaders throughout the organization.
“In addition to providing tools and training on medical staff governance to any physician member of the medical staff, HCA Healthcare works to develop our medical directors, and we give them leadership training so that they can be physician leaders of the future,” Dr. Mehta said. “We have several chief medical officers who are in our hospitals, and we do a Physician Leadership Academy, which is a year-long program with an executive coach.”
“Our physician leadership development is not an event—it’s a continuum,” Dr. Fagin said, adding that “we have physician leaders embedded in every facet of our organization.
“This not only creates value in how we approach our business and the care that we deliver but also provides incredible opportunities for professional growth for physicians,” he added. “Having the physician lens embedded in the decisions we make as a company started with our founders and remains an essential element of who we are today.”
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