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How Sutter Health Is Rebuilding the Physician Pipeline

How Sutter Health Is Rebuilding the Physician Pipeline

Lindsay Mazotti, MD

Chief Medical Officer,
Medical Science and
Education, Sutter Health

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.

Dr. Mazotti is a hospital medicine physician and medical education leader, coming to Sutter from dual educational leadership roles at the Kaiser Permanente Bernard J. Tyson School of Medicine in Pasadena, Calif., and Kaiser Permanente East Bay Medical Center in Oakland, Calif. She received her degree in human biology from Stanford University and completed her medical degree and residency in internal medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. She joined The Permanente Medical Group in 2010 after several years on faculty at UCSF.

Starting in 2016 as a founding faculty member and then as assistant dean for clinical education, she was instrumental in shaping KPSOM’s vision and design. With extensive experience in longitudinal integrated clerkships, Dr. Mazotti pioneered an innovative model, making KPSOM one of the first U.S. institutions with all students participating in a LIC. Her responsibilities at KPSOM encompassed creating and overseeing over 200 clinical rotations, curriculum development, competency-based assessment, and establishing relationships with affiliate universities and community partners.

Simultaneously, as the assistant physician-in-chief for education and development at Kaiser Permanente East Bay Medical Center since 2016, Dr. Mazotti held executive responsibility for the medical education continuum. This included pathway programs, undergraduate and graduate medical education, continuing medical education and leadership development.

Dr. Mazotti is also a member of the UCSF Academy of Medical Educators and participated in Drexel’s Executive Leadership in Academic Medicine program, and the Harvard Macy program. Her research interests include LICs, medical student assessment and the alignment between GME outcomes, systems-based practice and health systems science, most recently as a co-primary investigator on several grants for the American Medical Association’s Change Medical Education initiative.

 

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

Lindsay Mazotti, MD

Chief Medical Officer,
Medical Science and
Education, Sutter Health

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