Skip to main content

Women in Healthcare Leadership Spotlight: Tamarah Duperval-Brownlee

Analysis  |  By Melanie Blackman  
   March 04, 2021

Ascension's Chief Community Impact Officer Tamarah Duperval-Brownlee, MD, MPH, MBA shares how her curiosity, questions, and servant leadership style has influenced her executive experience.

Tamarah Duperval-Brownlee, MD, MPH, MBA, says her interest in healthcare began early on.

"I was a single-digit [in age,] for sure," she notes.

Now, Duperval-Brownlee has more than two decades of experience in healthcare and currently serves as senior vice president and chief community impact officer for Ascension, a nonprofit Catholic healthcare system headquartered in St. Louis.

Duperval-Brownlee says her mother, an immigrant from Haiti, also held a long interest in both health and medicine and served as one of her earliest mentors.

"Her work ethic, raising two girls as a single mom, paved the way. The cost of your being at the table is to be able to work hard and give, and that she did," Duperval-Brownlee tells HealthLeaders. "She laid a great foundation for me."

After her mother came to the U.S. and married, she entered the healthcare sector. "[My mother became] a nurse, got her associate degree after having a brief career in teaching, and then discovered that nursing was not for her," Duperval-Brownlee says. "She ended up going into laboratory science."

While visiting her mother in the lab, Duperval-Brownlee says her curiosity piqued. "I dug the whole thing: test tubes, and microscopes, and seeing doctors in the hallway," she says.

The servitude of healthcare leadership also called to her. "[There was] always this innate need to be able to help people and serve them in some way, shape, or form, with whatever I had. It seemed like a natural fit," she says.

Questions and curiosity lead the way

As her mother's career path took a turn, so did Duperval-Brownlee's.

"In medicine, [my career path has] been nothing like I thought it would be. I aimed to be the ultimate family doctor, which is what my primary discipline is,” she says. “But curiosity and challenges kept pushing me to explore different things. I probably should have been prepared for that since medicine is my second career."

Although she says she always had an interest in healthcare, Duperval-Brownlee originally went to school for chemical engineering and received a Bachelor of Science degree with a concentration in biomedical engineering from Northwestern University.

She later received a Master of Public Health degree from the Harvard University School of Public Health where she specialized in healthcare policy and maternal child health, as well as a Physician Executive Master of Business Administration from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville.

"In medicine, I wanted to be a doctor. I wanted to get in and know people's families," she says. "But I kept being bothered by some key questions: why some people had needs and why some people didn't."

A self-described extroverted-introvert, Duperval-Brownlee says she became a “reluctant leader” during her career but added that it was necessary to her development.

Duperval-Brownlee says she stepped up to lead for the populations to ensure that they had “healthcare access, and quality, and service.”

"Almost all my healthcare leadership roles, with the exception of my time at Ascension, came out of times of crisis where previous leadership had failed, there was a gap, and they needed somebody to step in and answer the call,” she says.

Duperval-Brownlee grew up receiving care from public sector healthcare systems and had seen firsthand the impacts of disparities in healthcare outcomes. She adds that her career path was driven by the questions that she had, as well as "divinely orchestrated opportunities."

"For example, after I trained, I thought I [was] going to start practicing then. But being able to do a fellowship in health policy that affected minority populations at Harvard changed my life," she says. "It gave me a direction to be at the table to influence those systems that enable everybody to live healthily and well, but particularly those who have been made marginalized."

Duperval-Brownlee worked in underserved medicine for 14 years, where she says she began asking questions about "where our decisions [are] being made and where are the resources."

In March 2019, she joined Ascension as the organization’s first senior vice president and chief community impact officer.

"Being able to be a part of a system like Ascension gave a different lens about how you can use your seat at the table, and your platform, to affect that many more people,” she says. “It's the curiosity and the questions that needed to be answered that drove it all along. I'm really grateful for all the experiences … they've made me who I am today."

Finding a voice

In addition to her mother, Duperval-Brownlee says mentors and sponsors have come in "interesting forms" throughout her life.

"My own pediatrician when I was growing up ended up being a professor of mine when I was in medical school. That was really rewarding," she says. "I had never seen a female doctor, let alone a black female doctor, prior to meeting her. To be able to benefit from her knowledge was awesome and she encouraged me."

Other mentors included people who inspired Duperval-Brownlee along the way, such as her program director in residency, "a white gentleman who had a passion for caring for people who were vulnerable and underserved." She adds that she was inspired by his work ethic, which drove her to figure out what to do with her questions, passion, and skills.

She also credits a sponsor, who's a member of Ascension, for making sure opportunities were created for her while also challenging her to rise above barriers.

"I'll never forget, we had a conversation once when I was about to start another program opportunity and [they said], 'Tam, you are one of the most risk-averse people I've ever met, so I'm challenging you to explore this while you're about to start something new; come with your fullest self, and [don't] be afraid.' It was just the swift kick in the pants I needed to go to another level," she says.

Duperval-Brownlee attributes her greatest challenge to finding and using her voice.

"It's a challenge, sometimes, in executive leadership spaces to ensure that the voice you have is heard … and letting people in the room know that it's worth being heard," she says. "I certainly had a number of various experiences [where] my voice was minimized. I initially took it as hurt. But then I turned it around, and I enlisted the help of others to say, 'What is it, if it's not me? How do you transform that?'"

Duperval-Brownlee says she has grown as a leader and found her voice at Ascension, where she's excited about the organization's commitment to be "intentional in being anti-racist, as well as realizing an identity of being inclusive in all aspects of what we do."

"I love this because it's not an initiative, it is our framework. It's challenging our organizations to reckon with some things that are sometimes scary," she says. "Everyone, from the person who is at the most frontline entry levels to our CEO, has a critical role in understanding, critical examining, listening, learning, and then acting."

Advice for future leaders

Duperval-Brownlee suggests that those who want to join the C-suite should "think about it very carefully before doing it."

She explained that not everyone necessarily wants to join the C-suite. "It has to critically resonate with your purpose," she says. Those who are interested should ask themselves:

  • What is my purpose?
  • What is my passion?
  • What skills of mine are aligned to succeed?

The C-suite should also be diverse and reflective of the organization, she notes, urging a call for diverse voices as leaders, including women, people of color, people of diverse backgrounds, and people who've had experiences in different careers.

"The C-suite is a humble place to be able to affect things in an organization, and particularly in healthcare," she says. "It's a critical time that we bring diverse voices and perspectives to the table."

Duperval-Brownlee also says that to keep advancing, leaders should remind themselves that they are necessary.

"Your voice, your skills, your positions, your background; all of it is necessary to not only be successful for you, but for others that you're intending to reach," she says. "Keep learning, and not to be comfortable with being comfortable. Continue to challenge yourself with the opportunities of stretching and being uncomfortable with situations that help you grow."

Related: Google expands Care Studio, controversial pilot project using patient data

Related: Donald Brennan, former Providence president and first Ascension CEO, dies at 83

Related: Women in Healthcare Leadership Spotlight: Robin Hoeg

“Continue to challenge yourself with the opportunities of stretching and being uncomfortable with situations that help you grow.”

Melanie Blackman is a contributing editor for strategy, marketing, and human resources at HealthLeaders, an HCPro brand.

Photo credit: Milwaukee, WI / USA - May 07, 2020: Aerial view of the North Point Water Tower and Ascension Columbia St. Mary's Hospital Milwaukee / Editorial credit: James Meyer / Shutterstock.com


Get the latest on healthcare leadership in your inbox.