2009 ‘Spotlight’ Award Alumni Winner

Spotlight Award recipient Tracy Stevens (M.D. ’90, School of Medicine) says it’s the people she’s surrounded herself with – friends, family and colleagues – who helped develop her passion for medicine into a career she loves. Since earning her medical degree at UMKC, Stevens has set out to build a relationship with patients on a foundation of trust and reliability.

“I try to to challenge those I train not to treat a patient as a number or a disease, but as a person with a family and a history,” she says.

Stevens serves as the medical director for the Saint Luke’s Muriel I. Kauffman Women’s Heart Center, where she works in preventive cardiology and heart transplantation. She has won the Mayo Clinic Outstanding Achievement Award in Cardiovascular Health, served as president of the local division of the American Heart Association and helped bring then first lady Laura Bush to Kansas City to promote the Heart Truth Campaign, which helps increase women’s awareness of heart disease.

She puts a premium on respecting and appreciating every patient she helps. It’s a lesson she says she learned years ago when her husband, Brian Lee, assured her that a late-night call into the emergency room was not an inconvenience.

“He told me, ‘That patient doesn’t want to be there either,’ ” Stevens recalls. “From that moment, I learned a patience and calmness that I think I carry every day.”