Celebrating Excellence: How This Healthcare Leader Is Putting Patients First

ZS is thrilled to announce that Sharon Suchotliff has received a 2024 Healthcare Businesswomen’s Association (HBA) Luminary Award. This distinction celebrates Sharon’s leadership in advancing patient centricity and her dedication to helping women achieve their career aspirations. With this award, she joins a global network of exceptional professionals sparking meaningful movement within healthcare and the workplace. When it comes to talented experts driving progress in and beyond ZS, Sharon shines.

Where passion changes lives

At ZS, Sharon uses her extensive global experience in and outside of healthcare to help pharmaceutical, biotech, and medtech companies put the patient at the center of everything they do. This includes developing and implementing innovative solutions that promote patient-centric decision-making. Tools like ZS’s Patient Outcomes Impact (POI™) metrics aim to increase positive interactions and outcomes, paving a path to better health for all.

Sharon is known to bring vitality to ZS’s patient-centric work and supports the goal of transforming strategic approaches in healthcare. With a mindset open to possibilities, she excels at turning ideas into tangible solutions. Additionally, she helps the industry change its perspective and practices to make improved health outcomes and reduced costs a reality.

It’s this steadfast focus to create positive change where it matters that led her to co-author a book with ZS Principal Hensley Evans: Reinventing Patient Centricity: Bringing Patient-Led Business Models to Life. In tandem with the companion Patient Centricity podcast, the book champions the idea that life sciences are a dynamic force in transforming the patient experience.

“Sharon and I have worked together for more than a decade, and I can’t think of anyone else that I would have wanted to co-author a book with,” Hensley says. “Sharon brings a deep intellectual curiosity to everything she does — always digging into the ‘why and how’ of the topics we were exploring. She’s also happy to roll up her sleeves to get things done. She and I came out of this book writing process as even closer friends than when we started, which is a testament to what a great collaborator she was and remains.”

Sharon is energized by ZS’s entrepreneurial approach and investment in employee ambitions within and outside the firm. “At ZS, we focus on patients as people and consider their full experience,” Sharon says, “and we also create ways for our people to give back, volunteering their time and expertise.”

Through Women@ZS, one of ZS’s many employee-led inclusion and diversity groups, she’s helped empower underserved women with workforce development and educational partnerships with nonprofit organizations such as Working for Women (W4W) and New Women New Yorkers (NWNY). Piloted in ZS’s New York office in 2019, the W4W initiative is now a multi-office program, supporting hundreds of women across the U.S. each year.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Sharon was instrumental in launching a panel series, Health Equity is Women’s Equity, which gathered hundreds of people from around the world to explore tough conversations about topics that are critical to women’s health — starting with recognizing and discussing the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on marginalized communities. Since then, the annual series has continued to tackle important discussions on period poverty, the impact of menopause on work, and how mental health uniquely impacts women.

Sharon is honored to be named an HBA Luminary, acknowledging the vital role of several ZS mentors in this achievement. As a mother of two young children, she feels fully empowered to cultivate a strong trajectory, not just for the industry but for her family, too. “ZS has given me the support, tools, and freedom to make a significant impact,” she says.

Congratulations, Sharon! 

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