LifeScape’s Dr. Susan Wilder Named a 2026 Healthcare Hero for Healthcare Education

We have some exciting news to share! Phoenix Business Journal has named LifeScape founder and CEO Dr. Susan Wilder the winner of its 2026 Healthcare Heroes award in the Healthcare Education category.

Nearly four decades of practicing and teaching

Dr. Wilder has practiced medicine since 1988 and founded LifeScape in Scottsdale in 2003. Today she practices family, functional, and integrative medicine and leads a multidisciplinary team of clinicians and support professionals.

Teaching has run alongside patient care for her entire career. She completed a fellowship in medical education, directed an Air Force residency, and founded the Family Medicine Residency and the clinical genomics education program at Mayo Clinic. Over the years she has trained hundreds of medical students and residents, and her work has reached even more people through journal articles, textbook chapters, lectures, and national media. She still teaches University of Arizona medical students.

Why she teaches

Asked why she teaches in addition to practicing, Dr. Wilder explained that she doesn’t see them as two separate callings. In her view, every meaningful visit with a patient is also a chance to educate, and often both sides learn something. She teaches patients and families so they can shape their health rather than just react to it. She teaches clinicians because one good insight gets carried to every patient they’ll ever see. And she speaks to businesses, communities, and policymakers because health is shaped well beyond the exam room.

In her words, “The setting has evolved; the calling has not.”

What she’d tell the next generation of educators

Her advice is that having access to information isn’t the same as being educated. Medical knowledge will keep changing, and technology will keep putting more of it within reach. What teachers can offer is curiosity, humility, sound judgment, and the willingness to listen before reaching a conclusion. She believes the best educators don’t just make clinicians more knowledgeable. They make them wiser and more humane, and more deserving of a patient’s trust.

What the recognition means for LifeScape

This is the approach you’ll find throughout LifeScape: care that treats the whole person, and a belief that understanding your own health is part of getting well. Dr. Wilder’s recognition is a reflection of that philosophy and of the team that works alongside her every day.

Congratulations, Dr. Wilder, and thank you for what you’ve built. Read the Phoenix Business Journal’s feature here and meet the other Healthcare Heroes honored this year.