How Sutter Health Is Rebuilding the Physician Pipeline

What happens when a health system stops trying to recruit its way out of a workforce challenge, and instead redesigns the pipeline itself?

In this episode of Bright Spots in Healthcare, Eric Glazer sits down with Dr. Lindsay Mazotti, Chief Medical Officer of Medical Science and Education at Sutter Health, for a candid, system-level conversation about rethinking how physicians are trained, supported, and developed for the future of care.

Rather than focusing on workforce shortages as a policy or awareness problem, this conversation explores what happens after the reality is already clear—when leaders choose to redesign foundational systems instead of managing around constraints.

Dr. Mazotti shares how Sutter is treating graduate medical education as strategic infrastructure, not an academic side function, and what it takes to build a physician pipeline that can scale, adapt, and endure.

Using examples from rural training pathways, academic partnerships, research translation, and digital transformation, the discussion surfaces how education becomes the load-bearing structure that allows health systems to absorb change without breaking.

This episode is designed for health system leaders who are no longer asking whether change is needed, but are grappling with how to build systems that can carry what’s coming next.

In this episode, we cover:

• Why physician shortages can’t be solved through recruiting alone
• How Sutter is redesigning the physician pipeline end to end
• What changes when graduate medical education is treated as core infrastructure
• How training clinicians for place shapes rural and underserved care delivery
• Why education is the missing link between research, digital innovation, and day-to-day care
• Where clinician training determines adoption—or abandonment—of new technologies
• The leadership tradeoffs that come with moving from individual patient care to system-level impact
• What leaders must unlearn when building durable, long-term capability

About Dr. Lindsay Mazotti:
Dr. Lindsay Mazotti leads system-wide initiatives at Sutter Health that advance medical education, research, and innovation in support of the organization’s mission to deliver exceptional, patient-centered care to more than 3 million patients across 22 counties in Northern California. In her role, she focuses on strategically integrating medical education into the health system’s infrastructure to align with long-term priorities, including Sutter’s Destination 2030 initiative. Dr. Mazotti oversees undergraduate and graduate medical education across the system—spanning clinical rotations, scholarships, residency and fellowship programs, and academic partnerships—while working closely with aligned medical groups representing more than 14,000 physicians to develop and support physician educators. Her work centers on building innovative training pathways that address physician workforce needs, align with evolving care delivery models, and strengthen long-term system capability, with the goal of quadrupling Sutter’s GME footprint by 2030 to become the largest community-based GME program in California.

Learn more about Dr. Mazotti - https://www.linkedin.com/in/lindsay-mazotti

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Bright Spots Ventures is a healthcare strategy and engagement company that creates content, communities, and connections to accelerate innovation. We help healthcare leaders discover what's working, and how to scale it. By bringing together health plan, hospital, and solution leaders, we facilitate the exchange of ideas that lead to measurable impact. Through our podcast, executive councils, private events, and go-to-market strategy work, we surface and amplify the "bright spots" in healthcare—proven innovations others can learn from and replicate. At our core, we exist to create trusted relationships that make real progress possible. Visit our website at www.brightspotsinhealthcare.com.

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