A physician with local roots was nominated among her peers as a Top Doctor and was featured on the cover of The Phoenix Magazine for its March/April edition.

Dr. Brittane Parker is a board-certified Internal Medicine academic physician at Mayo Clinic in Arizona. She is the daughter of Daniel and Cheval Thomas-Parker and granddaughter of Wesley and Marie Thomas.

Parker was born at Wewoka Memorial Hospital and delivered by Dr. Michael Houghton, Wewoka’s beloved family physician who tragically died in a plane crash near Seminole in 1999.

As a child, Parker moved to Michigan where her father is a native but subsequently moved back to Tulsa, Oklahoma in 2000 to finish high school and attended the University of Oklahoma where her parents met.

While at the University of Oklahoma, she studied biochemistry and decided to pursue a career in medicine which paired her love of science with the opportunity to serve people in need. After completing her Bachelors of Science in 2009, she was accepted to the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee and received her medical degree in 2013.

Dr. Parker moved to Phoenix, Arizona to train in Internal Medicine at the University of Arizona College of Medicine. There she developed her medical skills and served as the president of both the Internal Medicine House staff council and the Resident Council helping to advocate for changes to improve the working environment of medial trainees.

As patient safety is a key value for Dr. Parker, she worked alongside her colleagues to identify opportunities for improvement to help keep patients safe and presented solutions that were implemented hospital-wide. In her last year of training, Dr. Parker was nominated for several awards including Resident Teacher of the Year, Ambulatory Medicine Resident of the Year and was chosen by her peers as “The Physician I Would Most Like To Be Cared For If I Was A Patient”.

Dr. Brittane Parker was selected by the hospital faculty to serve as the Chief Resident in Internal Medicine in 2016 and joined the practice as Junior Faculty and became an Assistant Clinical Professor in the Division of Internal Medicine at the University of Arizona College of Medicine - Phoenix. During that year, she saw patients in the hospital and followed them later in the clinic. She was also in charge of mentoring and scheduling work rotations for over one hundred residents with her fellow Chief Residents.

Dr. Parker helped develop an innovative, longitudinal educational curriculum for young doctors titled “The Resident Physical Leadership Development Course” alongside her friend and surgical colleague Dr. Cory Bushmann. Together, they worked to bring awareness to the importance of humanism, interpersonal skills and resiliency and provided the young physicians with coaching sessions, communication skills workshops and opportunities for career development.

In 2017, Dr. Parker was recruited and hired by Mayo Clinic in Phoenix Arizona and joined the Division of Hospital Medicine as a Senior Associate Consultant in September of that year. Prior to starting, she took two months off to return to Oklahoma and spend much needed time with her family across the state in Tulsa, Oklahoma City and Wewoka.

Service to others has been a value instilled in her by her parents and grandparents who have been strong leaders in their own community. Looking for an opportunity to give back, Dr. Parker opted to work with the Indian Health Service at Lawton Indian Hospital, in Oklahoma for several weeks prior to starting at Mayo Clinic. The experience of helping patients within her home state and delivering care to the Native America population, was very rewarding. Dr. Parker can trace her lineage to the Seminole, Choctaw and Cherokee Native American tribes.

Now at Mayo Clinic, she teaches young doctors both the art of medicine and, by example, the leadership skills which have helped her to develop a collaborative method of working in a complex medical system. In 2019, she became the Associate Program Director for one of the residency training programs and is one of the faculty that interviews physician candidates from across the country who are seeking to train at Mayo. Her favorite quote is by Jeff Wahl, “The difference between good teachers and great teachers is that great teachers have mastered the art of teaching people things they didn’t know they needed to learn.”

Dr. Parker currently works on research projects with colleagues to further advances in medical knowledge as well as traveling to teach end-of life conversation techniques to physicians, nurses, chaplains, hospice workers around the state of Arizona.

In her spare time, Dr. Parker enjoys playing with her softball team weekly, hiking in the Sonoran desert, trail running and she completed her first marathon in January 2019 at the Rock and Roll Marathon in Phoenix. In addition, she is an avid traveler having spent several weeks volunteering in rural hospitals in Jamaica and at the University of Edinburgh’s rehabilitation centers in Scotland. She recently traveled to Nigeria with the organization “Equal As One”, to provide medical care in a rural community and is looking forward to continuing mission work asa board member.

Outside of medicine and academia, Dr. Parker is a donor and Board Member of the Arizona Community Foundation’s BPI fund. She makes time to catch up with her fellow female physicians with whom she trained with the goal of developing business and financial opportunities, sharing strategies to improve care to their patients and providing support in a challenging profession.

In spite of all of her education, professional successes and accomplishments, Dr. Brittane Parker is still firmly grounded in her faith, serving her local church community and providing a place of refugee for those in need as well as in her family.

Dr. Parker appreciates the road that was paved by her ancestors and strives daily to leave a strong legacy behind for future generations.