They started talking to their colleagues, who echoed their dismay that their careers had swallowed their whole lives. “They said they worked all the time,” says Mehta. Butala went into private practice so he could spend more time with his family, while Mehta, by this point obsessed with the issue of health provider burnout and with some time between jobs, started writing and speaking about the phenomenon.

“Nowadays it’s pretty well known that burnout is a prevalent problem in healthcare, but at that time, people weren’t really talking about it,” Mehta says. In fact, after her first article on physician burnout was published, Mehta’s mentors at Brown and elsewhere urged the former neuroscience concentrator to avoid the topic. “You can’t write about this stuff,” Mehta says they warned her,  “you’re never going to get a job. People are going to think you’re lazy.”

Research shows physician burnout has been on the rise due to increasing paperwork, less time with patients, and decreasing insurance reimbursements—and that it leads to emotional exhaustion, decreased empathy for patients, and a dwindling sense of personal achievement. According to a 2025 American Medical Association study, more than 43 percent of physicians exhibit at least one such symptom.

Determined to address the problem, Mehta in 2016 founded physiciansidegigs.com, a doctors-only online community rich with resources to give doctors work options other than the traditional, grueling 60-hour practitioner workweek. Some of those include consulting, expert witness work, telemedicine, and “locums” (freelance, short-term healthcare providers). The platform now has more than 210,000 members.

Then, in 2018, Mehta launched the Physician Community Facebook group, a “virtual doctors’ lounge” where 90,000+ members can share their experiences and knowledge, ask one another questions, get colleagues’ opinions—or simply chat and blow off steam together.