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Alan Shatzel, DO: A Quiet Leader, A Fierce Advocate Mercy Medical Group CEO Has Eye for Innovation, Commitment to Balance
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lan Shatzel, DO, readily admits that he may not be the most exciting person in the world. “I wish I could tell you I race Formula One cars or do something extraordinarily exciting,” Dr. Shatzel, 52, said. “I’m not a very exciting person outside my work. I’m a brain doctor and I run a very large practice.” Exciting or not as it may be — and there will be some who would say Formula One may be easier than either of those two vocations — Dr. Shatzel has helped build Mercy Medical Group into one of the area’s largest, has had to navigate the organization through the pandemic, and has put a focus on allowing physicians and other providers to do what they do best. He also still spends about 10 percent of his time in his neurology practice, a specialty he became hooked on during his third year of medical school. “Part of why I love neurology is that it’s like the final frontier in medicine,” he said. “There is still so much we don’t know or understand about our brain, specifically the central nervous system.” Megan Babb, DO, a MMG physician, said Dr. Shatzel’s quiet and reserved demeanor is often in contrast with his intense efforts to support the group’s providers. “Mercy Medical Group is lucky to have him as our leader,” Dr. Babb said. “He is a fierce leader with an eye for innovation. He continues to challenge the health care system though his advocacy efforts on behalf of physicians, and he is not afraid of addressing change when it is necessary to keep the practice of medicine safe for those working within it.” Dr. Shatzel, who is also a sleep specialist, says MMG is working to incorporate artificial intelligence to simplify time-intensive tasks such as with documentation, coding and billing. While filling forms and writing reports is a necessary part of the job, he says, it’s not what physicians want to spend their time on.
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Sierra Sacramento Valley Medicine
By Ken Smith ken@kdscommunications.com
“We do them, but that’s not why we went to medical school,” Dr. Shatzel said. “We go to medical school because we want to help people, we want to care for others, we want to solve problems, to use our knowledge to help our community, to help our patients.” As was the case throughout the health care community, the pandemic changed a lot of the way business was done at MMG. While reducing elective surgeries created a challenge for patients and also for health systems that relied on volume of service, Dr. Shatzel said it also showed the resiliency of a large, multi-specialty group practice.
“The pandemic served as an accelerator for innovation. A year and a half later, we've done a quarter million virtual care visits.” “Everyone just kind of rallied and we did a lot of our best work early on,” he said, adding that the executive team made a commitment to take care of the group’s members that were hardest hit. “In some ways, it created a much tighter bond with our health system partners, because there was a lot of disruption. When you have mandates that are coming down that you have to start reducing your elective surgeries, you have to do a lot of things that will make it very challenging for the care and service of patients.” But there were also positive steps that grew out of the pandemic. “The pandemic served as an accelerator for innovation,” Dr. Shatzel said. “Things that we were piloting — dipping our toe in the water on — for example ambulatory virtual care services, we scaled in less than two and a half weeks. A year and a half later, we’ve