How we make this
The editorial process behind Healthcare, Briefly, Surviving Residency Guide, the PhysEmp Index, and our Specialty Career Briefs.
The short version
Humans decide what matters. AI helps us read faster. Humans decide what runs.
If that’s all you wanted to know, you can stop here. The rest is the long version.
The long version
PhysEmp has been covering the physician labor market since 1990. That’s longer than some of our readers have been alive, which is a fact we try not to dwell on. Over those decades, we’ve built a curated network of industry sources — trade publications, policy outlets, health system announcements, workforce data releases, recruiting industry reports, and the occasional academic paper that’s actually readable. The sourcing list is maintained by the PhysEmp Editorial Team and refined continuously based on what proves useful and what proves to be noise.
Every week, articles from those sources flow into an analysis pass. This is where AI earns its keep: scanning across dozens of pieces to surface recurring themes, contradictions between sources, and patterns a human editor would eventually catch but more slowly. Think of it as a very fast research assistant — one that reads everything, forgets nothing, and has no opinions of its own.
The themes that surface get reviewed by humans. We decide what’s worth writing about, what’s noise, what’s been covered to death already, and what deserves a second look. When a topic falls outside our direct expertise, we bring in outside voices — practicing physicians, residency program leadership, recruiters in specialties we don’t live in daily — to make sure the analysis reflects how people inside the situation actually see it. That decision-making is human, and it’s the part that matters most.
Once a theme is chosen, AI drafts a first pass based on editorial direction — what angle to take, what the piece should argue, what to leave out, what voice to use. A separate pass handles titles. The published piece is the result of human framing, AI drafting within that frame, and human selection of what actually runs.
How this varies by publication
Healthcare, Briefly synthesizes the week’s most important developments for healthcare executives and recruiters. Wide aperture, tight word count.
Surviving Residency Guide applies the same process but filtered for medical residents — what’s actually relevant to people three years from a real paycheck and currently working their fourth night shift in a row. For this one, we add another layer: we monitor physician-heavy communities — Reddit threads, residency forums, specialty-specific discussions — to surface what residents are actually preoccupied with this week, not just what trade publications have decided to cover. Sometimes those line up. Sometimes the gap between them is the story.
Specialty Career Briefs (Internal Medicine, Family Medicine, and others as we expand) take general physician labor market coverage and filter it for relevance to a single specialty. The filtering criteria are set by the editorial team based on what specialists actually care about in their career decisions.
The PhysEmp Index is our recurring Harper’s-style data feature. AI helps us assemble the source pool; humans pick every entry that makes the final cut, because the format only works when the selections have a point of view.
What this isn’t
A content farm. We don’t ask AI “write me 10 articles about physician burnout” and publish whatever comes out. The themes are chosen, the angles are set, and a piece doesn’t run unless we think it earns the reader’s time.
What this is
A small editorial team using AI to read faster and draft faster, so we can publish more thoughtfully than our headcount would otherwise allow. The judgment — what matters, what’s true, what’s worth your inbox — is ours.
One more thing
If you ever spot something that misses the mark, tell us. Reader pushback is how editorial judgment gets sharper, and we’d rather hear it from you than read it on LinkedIn.
— The PhysEmp Editorial Team
