Today, on National Doctors’ Day, we honor our physicians for showing up with heart—every day, for every patient, across North Carolina.
We are deeply grateful for the care you provide, the trust you build with patients, and the leadership you bring to your teams. You are the reason UNC Health continues to be a place where academic excellence and community-centered care come together in powerful ways—and why this remains such a meaningful place to practice medicine.
Across our system, we are experiencing an important shift in how we work together. By uniting and strengthening our service lines—including Cancer, Heart & Vascular, Children’s, and Primary Care—we are taking a more intentional, systemwide approach to how care is delivered. This work is helping us think differently about how we deliver care across the state: keeping care local whenever possible, collaborating across entities in new ways, and building the infrastructure needed to support UNC Health’s vision to become both an academic and community powerhouse.
As a leading academic health system, UNC Health offers physicians the opportunity to shape the future of medicine through research and discovery. Our physicians are advancing basic science and clinical research that directly improves patient care and expands access to innovative treatments.
- Advancing Knowledge: More than 1,000 clinical trials are underway today, improving care for our patients and driving new discoveries that will benefit the world.
- Increasing Access to Clinical Research: UNC Clinical Research Partners is launching to improve access to clinical research across North Carolina by maximizing access to industry and other non-federally sponsored clinical studies in all fields of medicine. This launch will improve care for patients across the health system, including those in rural areas.
- Increasing Access to Clinical Data: The Secure Health Informatics Research Environment (SHIRE) is a new secure platform where researchers can safely work with EHR data.
- Increased Public Research Funding: The UNC School of Medicine is among the top five public universities to receive NIH funding in 2025. This funding will help us improve biomedical knowledge and health outcomes.
At the same time, we know that caring for patients starts with supporting our physicians. That’s why we continue to invest in tools and technology designed to streamline workflows and give you more time to focus on what matters most—your patients.
- Reducing documentation burden with AI: The systemwide implementation of Abridge AI scribing continues to gain momentum. Since launching last year, clinicians have generated nearly two million notes, representing more than 26.5 million minutes of documentation support across 3,151 clinicians—equivalent to 441,000 hours returned to patient care, teaching, and personal well-being.
- Faster, simpler access to technology: We are implementing a newer form of Imprivata badge tap that dramatically reduces login time—from as long as 70 seconds to less than 10 seconds. For clinicians who log in dozens of times each day, particularly in ambulatory settings, the time adds up quickly. To date, nearly 8,900 computers across UNC Health are enabled for badge tap, including more than 400 added in the last 30 days alone.
- Smarter access to patient information: This month, we started a phased roll out across the Triangle to evaluate how the AI-powered tool, Evidently, can summarize a patient’s full Epic medical record in minutes. During our pilot, hospitalists reported saving an average of 15 minutes per admission, while specialists saved approximately 19 minutes per half-day clinic. Nearly 90% of users reported satisfaction with the tool and believed it helped them provide better care, while returning valuable time to their day. We look forward to introducing this tool to more teammates with chart access in the coming months and exploring how this tool could benefit more clinicians across the system.
Together with our ongoing quality initiatives, these efforts are delivering measurable results across UNC Health. Over the past year, progress includes:
- Stronger behavioral health care: Nearly 300,000 patients were screened for depression over the past year. Collaborative care models with embedded Licensed Clinical Social Workers (LCSWs) helped 60% of enrolled patients reduce depression or anxiety symptoms by half—while also easing provider workload.
- Improved inpatient outcomes: Physician-led care contributed to a 9.1% reduction in inpatient mortality year over year, resulting in 256 fewer deaths in CY25.
- Strengthening cancer prevention: Screening rates for colorectal, breast, and cervical cancer now meet or exceed 80% across primary care and women’s health services.
- Consistently high-quality care: 79% of UNC Health inpatients were cared for in CMS 4 or 5-star hospitals, reflecting consistently high-quality clinical outcomes.
These outcomes reflect your commitment, partnership, and unwavering focus on delivering high-quality, patient-centered care.
Thank you for all that you do—for your patients, your teams, and our communities. We are proud to work alongside you, and we remain committed to making UNC Health the best place to practice medicine, today and into the future.
With gratitude and appreciation,
Cristy Page, MD, MPH
CEO, UNC Health
Dean, UNC School of Medicine
Matt Ewend, MD
Chief Clinical Officer, UNC Health
President, UNC Health Physicians
Jeff Lindsay
President and COO, UNC Health
Samantha Meltzer-Brody, MD
Chief Academic Officer, UNC Health
Executive Dean, UNC School of Medicine