When Steven Burkett was working in Memphis as a parole officer for the Tennessee Department of Corrections on the heels of college graduation, he was eyeing a career in medicine.

 

“I wanted to go to medical school, but chemistry tripped me up,” said Burkett, who joined UT Medical Group (then Faculty Medical Practice Corporation) in Memphis in the mid-1970s as a department manager.

 

With the exception of a few years spent with a medical group affiliated with the University of Missouri-Columbia, he has been a mainstay at UT Medical Group, leading one of the largest group practices in the Deep South.

 

“Managing change in the seemingly never-ending sea of change in healthcare is probably one of the greatest challenges in the management and practice of medicine,” he said. “Yet it’s also one of the things that make it fun. You do it with the goal in mind of taking care of people.”

 

Burkett grew up in North Little Rock, Ark., the oldest of three children born to Frank, a grocer, and his wife, Freida, a banker. His parents advocated the importance of education early on, “continually inspiring and challenging me,” he recalled.

 

“What probably intrigued me about medicine was my mother,” said Burkett. “When I was very small, she had a ruptured disk that required extensive back surgery. Later in life, she had surgery a couple more times. By the standard of the day, she was very well treated and cared for, but she also had complications. Neurosurgery in 1963 or 1964 wasn’t what it is today. Watching her struggle with rehabilitation while also trying to work full-time, and the demands it placed on our family got me interested in medicine.”

 

Partly to help the family, Burkett worked odd jobs throughout his teen years, beginning at the age of 12. He also excelled in baseball and football. For the latter, he had two careers. “At first, I played defensive end and linebacker with a passion,” he explained, “but I had enough joint injuries and wasn’t terribly big, so I was also on the offensive line.”

 

After graduating from high school in 1969, Burkett narrowed his choice to Southwestern at Memphis (now Rhodes College) or Vanderbilt University.

 

“I picked Memphis largely because it was closer to my mother,” he said. “It was another three hours—then closer to four—to drive to Nashville. I really liked it here and decided to stick around.”

 

Burkett pursued a double major—biology and psychology—but chemistry derailed his first career choice.

 

“I loved medicine and science,” he said. “But to go to medical school, you had to do well in chemistry, and I always seemed to make Cs. I don’t know if I had a learning disability or just a psychological dysfunction,” he joked. “Sure enough, the medical schools to which I applied all said the same thing: repeat chemistry; apply again. I couldn’t. So I went to work as a parole office largely based on my background in psychology for a little over three years. While I was there, I got a masters in health education and also a masters in public administration.”

 

Burkett joined UT Medical Group in 1976 as a department manager, left in the early 1980s to pursue the job in Missouri, and returned a few years later, eventually rising to president and CEO of the not-for-profit group practice affiliated with the UT College of Medicine.

 

“Without tax money or appropriations or similar financial support, we do a great job of providing service to a broad spectrum of citizens in the community,” he said. “It’s our physicians that staff the trauma center, The MED emergency rooms, and the Methodist-UT transplant program. We do our very best to provide quality healthcare to the community as a whole and in a way that supports the teaching program at the university. We’re UT Medical Group for a reason. We’re an affiliated entity, with students and residents in our practices, and we were created to be a synergistic organization with the university and with the community. A lot of people don’t know that.”

 

Because Memphis is fortunate to have large hospital systems, less attention is focused on physician groups, Burkett pointed out.

 

UTMG has just under 400 physicians, and about 600 employees. All these people are a vibrant part of this community and they offer their services and do their best to support it every day—IT people work 24/7, nurses come in when the weather’s bad with snow and ice on the road, doctors and nurseanesthetists go to The MED. Not enough is said about the people who make corporate organizations operate successfully.”

 

When Burkett was working as a parole officer, he reconnected with Anita, a family friend from Little Rock, Ark., who had relocated to Memphis and was working for Burkett’s boss. The couple, now married 33 years, have two daughters: Whitney, a recent law school graduate from DePaul living in Chicago; and Hillary, who earned an MBA in Memphis last May and married earlier this year. Burkett’s brother, Rick Burkett, works in the telecommunications industry in North Little Rock, Ark., and his sister, Stefani Maher, is a group underwriter for Blue Cross Blue Shield of Arkansas living in Mayflower, Ark.

 

“Some people might be surprised to learn that I spent 17 to 18 years coaching kids’ soccer for a local competitive club,” said Burkett, whose first volunteer coaching job was at the Church of the Holy Communion when his daughters were schoolchildren. A signature-scrawled teddy bear is prominently displayed in his office, a gift from one of his recent teams. “Coaching was my way of giving back to the community. I had a great time, with very little in the way of difficulties with parents that you hear about sometimes. My older daughter still plays soccer in Chicago, but I’ve given up the coaching hat—at least for now!”