Offcall Physician Spotlight: Dr. Yair Saperstein

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1. Yair, what would you tell a first-year resident that no one told you? You might find yourself in a system that treats you like a cog, but you've got the tools, the wherewithal, and now the domain knowledge to fix it from the inside. I've seen docs burn out when they collapse their whole self into the white coat, because they're stuck in a system they can't control. And I've seen docs thrive by embracing and driving what they can actually change.

Fix what's broken. Work together. Find your thing and get after it. You don't need anyone's permission. As Nate Gross told me years after my residency: no one got fired for building something to help their workflow.

2. Forget pizza parties — what's one way you've coped with burnout that's actually made a difference? Building. Not just building a product, but building with people toward something real. Clicking through meaningless documentation while watching patients fall through gaps I could see clearly but had no power to fix = no power to control something that was a major part of my life. My response was to start building: I helped implement a two-way communication system to replace pagers, worked on informatics infrastructure, started a wellness committee. Projects that made an actual dent. And eventually co-founding Avo, putting AI copilots directly into the EHR, because that let me drive the system from the inside out.