She spent more than fourteen years at WellMed Medical Group/ Optum in progressive medical director roles, where she founded the Office of Clinician Excellence, launched a peer coaching program, and co-founded the Clinical Health and Safety team. Those years in system leadership shaped how she thinks about medical practice, clinician workforce, and organizational design.
She received her MD from McGovern Medical School in Houston, completed her family medicine residency at Christus Spohn Memorial in Corpus Christi, and earned her MBA from the University of Texas at Dallas. She holds the Professional Certified Coach (PCC) credential from the International Coaching Federation.
Outside of her consulting work, Dr. Suttin serves as Chair of the South Central Texas Regional Board of Trustees for Blood Cancer United, an organization for which she has volunteered since 2020. She lives in San Antonio with her husband and their four children, and she’ll take any excuse to travel somewhere new. When she’s not on the road, she’s training for her next half marathon or camping with her husband and rescue dog in their travel trailer.
There comes a point in many women’s lives when they realize they have spent decades earning.
Earning opportunities. Earning promotions. Earning trust. Earning respect. Earning financial security. Earning the right to take up space. Earning the confidence of others. Earning the title, the role, the seat at the table.
For many women, achievement begins early. Work hard. Be responsible. Be prepared. Be dependable. Prove yourself. Add value. Contribute. Carry your share.
She currently serves as the Assistant Vice President of System Effectiveness at Cook Children’s Healthcare System (CCHCS) in Fort Worth, TX and is tasked with establishing operational excellence and process improvement strategies for the system and also charged with providing operational leadership for the Innovation program. She enjoys mentoring employees and coaching leaders on their journey to excellence.
Since 2013, she has served as an Adjunct Professor in the Industrial, Manufacturing & Systems Engineering Department at the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA), in Arlington, TX.
She is from the beautiful island of St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands and enjoys spending time with her family and supporting her church community.
There is a particular kind of loneliness that doesn’t look like loneliness from the outside.
It looks like competence.
It looks like being prepared, responsive, calm, and available. It looks like being the person others trust when the room gets tense or the plan starts to wobble. It looks like knowing how to keep things moving, how to steady the conversation, and how to listen without making the moment about yourself.
From the outside, it can look like success. But inside, many women who lead know there is something else happening too.
She was the flexible one, the reliable one, the one who could step into difficult situations without creating more tension around them.
If something needed to get done, she figured it out. If personalities became difficult, she adjusted. If deadlines tightened, she absorbed the pressure quietly and kept moving.
People appreciate her for it.
They trusted her. They depended on her. They described her as collaborative, supportive, professional, and calm. And for a long time, those qualities felt like strengths…because they were.
But over time, something else started happening too.
For a long time, leadership was viewed as something deeply individual. You worked hard. You proved yourself. You climbed. And if you succeeded, the story often focused on personal resilience, determination, and the ability to overcome barriers along the way.
That narrative still exists, and parts of it are true. Many women did have to navigate systems that were difficult, competitive, or isolating. Many learned how to lead in environments where support was inconsistent and visibility had to be earned repeatedly.
For a long time, leadership was described as a climb.
You worked your way up. You proved yourself. You took on more responsibility, more visibility, more pressure…until eventually you reached a level that reflected everything you had built.
And for many women, that climb required more than just capability. It required persistence, resilience, and finding ways forward in environments that were not always designed with them in mind.
So when women reached leadership roles, the assumption was simple…they made it.
But something has been quietly changing. Reaching the top is no longer the only measure that matters.
She co-founded Imagine Pediatrics, a value-based care company that serves nearly 100,000 children on Medicaid. She sits on advisory boards for multiple early-stage digital health companies and partners with venture funds and operators on clinical strategy and physician-led innovation. She still works shifts in the pediatric ER — the source of every idea she builds […]
Some of it is exciting. Some of it is overwhelming. And some of it has created a familiar question for women leaders: Are we keeping up?
But that question may be too small.
Because the more interesting story is not whether women are behind in AI. It’s how many women are stepping into the part of the conversation that matters most…how AI is governed, trusted, adopted, and used responsibly.
There’s another shift happening for women in leadership…and it’s showing up in a very different way.
More women are beginning to take their physical strength seriously…and it’s not a side goal or something separate from their work….but it’s part of how they lead.
There’s a moment that many leaders have quietly experienced, even if they’ve never said it out loud.
It’s not dramatic and it doesn’t happen all at once. It shows up slowly, over time, in the middle of doing work they care about. They start to feel the weight of it.
For a long time, value in the workplace was something many people believed would eventually be recognized if they simply did the work well enough. It showed up through raises, promotions, expanded responsibilities, or the quiet acknowledgement that someone had “earned it.” The path felt familiar…work hard, deliver consistently, be dependable, be valuable, and at some point, the system would reflect that value back.
