August 21, 2025
Dr. Steventon works as a family physician and chief medical officer at Avance Care, PA. In addition, she serves as a member of the NCAFP Board of Directors and the NCAFP Executive Committee.
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She grew up on a farm in Maple City, KS. “I grew up in the middle of nowhere,” Dr. Steventon says. “It’s the cliché where there were more cows than people.”
But even in Maple City, Dr. Steventon enjoyed the care of a local family physician. That care served her well when she faced severe health concerns at age five. “I went for my kindergarten checkup with our doctor, who noticed that I had a very significant heart murmur,” Dr. Steventon says. “I had to have an open-heart surgery with an atrial septal defect repair. That was how I was introduced to the world of medicine. From that point, I wanted to be a physician.”
Her path to becoming a physician included routes through other health care settings: Dr. Steventon worked as a nursing home assistant during college at the University of Kansas, a medical assistant in a Seattle clinic, and even an emergency medical technician. “All these led me closer toward medicine,” Dr. Steventon says.
After she returned to Kansas to enroll at the University of Kansas Medical School, Dr. Steventon seized the chance to become a physician. She chose Family Medicine because of her patient-care experiences there. “I did my med school rotations in Tribune, McPherson, and Chanute,” Dr. Steventon says. “Those rural sites are where I fell in love with the patient-physician relationship and longitudinal care.”
Ultimately, Dr. Steventon followed that love into a rural Family Medicine clinic in Winfield, KS: Bluestem Family Health. Once there, she wanted to do it all: “I did full-spectrum care there: delivering babies, work in the hospital, work with the health department, and even rounds at a nearby nursing home,” Dr. Steventon says. In addition, she owned the clinic and enjoyed the management responsibilities that her role required.
Still, Dr. Steventon found that better opportunities waited in North Carolina. “We knew that owning the practice probably wasn’t sustainable in pre-Medicaid expansion Kansas with so many of our patients being Medicaid and Medicare patients,” she says. “It was the state economy and the reimbursement that drove us out.” In 2019, Dr. Steventon and her family moved to Benson, NC, where she began working at Benson Health.
After two years in Benson, she began work at Avance Care in Fuquay-Varina. Today, she serves as the clinic’s medical director and chief medical officer for all of Avance Care. “I have a leadership bug,” Dr. Steventon says, “and Avance drew me in with promises of practice management. I really enjoy that part of medicine.”
Dr. Steventon’s path into medical leadership hit a sharp upward curve when she joined the inaugural class of the Leading Physicians Well-being Scholars program in 2020. This American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) opportunity coincided with Dr. Steventon’s first engagements with the NCAFP in 2021, when she joined the Advocacy Committee. Both opportunities introduced her to the policy aspects of Family Medicine. “Being able to have a seat at the table where those decisions are made was important to me,” Dr. Steventon says. “Having input in those decisions became a real interest of mine.”
These experiences came at a pivotal time for Dr. Steventon. “Losing my practice and coming here as an employed physician was a significant shift in my identity,” she says. “Those leadership positions helped reset the course of my career.”
Today, Dr. Steventon serves in leadership roles for both NCAFP and Avance Care. The policy and management decisions she leads in her workplace are extensions of her commitment to patient care, Dr. Steventon says: “I do all my administrative work from a clinical perspective: visiting the clinics, interviewing every clinician that comes through our doors, even ordering extra monitors. I’m always trying to answer, How can we move the needle on meaningful changes that make our practices sustainable and provide open access to our patients?” Leading is her best way of helping, she explains. “I have a unique position: when something doesn’t work, I can lead our brainstorming on how to make it better for all our clinics.”
And of course, Dr. Steventon still continues to care for her patients. “I still see patients on Mondays,” Dr. Steventon says. “I have always planned to see patients. The thing that is most rewarding to me is still the patient connection. Most of my patients followed me from Benson Health, and so they've been with me for almost six years now. I’ve gotten to see them grow healthier.”
“I started with one idea of what a physician was, and it is obviously not where I am now in my career,” she says. “Other specialties can’t afford that style of opportunity. Family Medicine is versatile. It can grow with you. It can change with you and your trajectory in life.”
