photo by: Eric Ayres

Teamwork makes the dream work at Shats Gastroenterology in St. Clairsville. From left are Lisa Shats, practice administrator; Jessica Masters, medical assistant; Dr. Daniel Shats, gastroenterologist and owner; Tesla Hampton, nurse practitioner; Mimi Parsons; medical assistant; and Lori Steiner, certified clinical medical assistant.

ST. CLAIRSVILLE — Over the past year, Dr. Daniel Shats opened his own private practice in the Ohio Valley with goals of not only raising awareness about digestive health care but also making the process of receiving this vital medical care as convenient as possible for his patients.

After opening his office at 46898 National Road West in St. Clairsville last spring, Shats Gastroenterology launched a grassroots ad campaign to help get the word out — and it worked. With phrases like “Dr. Shats reporting for doody” raising eyebrows and stirring chuckles across the valley, the doctor and his staff were successful in making a memorable splash about his independent practice.

“I think it was a really successful campaign,” Shats said. “I still hear about it on a regular basis from patients who loved what they saw. It’s basically just injecting a little bit of humor and lightheartedness into the valley. It gets word of mouth going and it gets people talking. We want you to know that you’ve got to get checked and you got to be screened. That keeps us all healthier.”

Shats said he had always been drawn to the field of gastroenterology — a hands-on practice that involves procedures that in many cases are truly life-saving for patients.

“I always had an idea that I wanted to get into this specialty because I think that the range of diseases is so interesting,” Shats said. “People spend a lot of time thinking about their stomachs, and there can be universal problems from a very young age all the way to a very old age. So the combination of the medicine and the procedures made it interesting.”

Today, Shats and his family reside in Wheeling and have their office based in St. Clairsville. His wife, Lisa, serves as the practice administrator for Shats Gastroenterology. While they are proud Ohio Valley residents now, they both came from major metropolitan areas.

“I’m actually Canadian,” Shats noted. “I grew up in Toronto. I came to the U.S. ultimately for medical school. That’s where I met my wife, eventually became a citizen, and now the United States is my home.”

A job opportunity is what brought the “transplants” from the concrete jungle to the much more relaxed setting in the Ohio Valley.

“We’ve always lived in big cities,” Shats explained. “Lisa is from Miami, I grew up in Toronto, we met in New York. When it came time to decide where we wanted to live and where I wanted to look for a job, we wanted something a little smaller, a little more personal and a little slower paced — not a rush. So the Ohio Valley was an ideal choice — the job opportunity and the people just made it a great choice. We’ve been here since 2012.”

After settling down in the area and working for another practice for years, Shats was briefly contracted as a private physician by the now defunct East Ohio Regional Hospital before setting out on his own.

“I wanted to remain sort of independent in private practice,” he said. “I never wanted to join a large hospital system and be employed by one of the hospital systems. I really value the independence, and I want to be able to make the decisions for my patients that benefit them the best, and I feel that in this kind of a format, I can be the most nimble and make the changes and do the type of medicine that services the community the best.”

Shats Gastroenterology has assembled a top-notch staff along the way.

“I’ve been lucky enough to have excellent people that I’ve worked with previously like Tesla (Hampton), who is my nurse practitioner,” Shats said. “We opened up here in April, and it’s been amazing. It’s been great, and I feel like we’re really able to accomplish a lot of the goals that I set out to do.”

The St. Clairsville location is primarily for office visits only. However, that is about to change later this year when Shats Gastroenterology relocates to Plaza West in St. Clairsville.

“We are moving down the street into the surgery center that was once a gastroenterology surgery center,” Shats said. “We’re now in the process of doing a little bit of renovations, updating it. And we hope to be in there in the near future. It might take about six months or so for all of the licensing and approvals. But that’s our next step.”

At the new location, the team will be able to perform endoscopies in an outpatient ambulatory surgery center, as it is known.

“We’ll be doing procedures under anesthesia there,” Shats said. “We’ll make it very convenient and very comfortable for patients to come in, get their scopes done and leave within a couple hours. We want to make it much more convenient than being in a hospital, which tends to be a much more involved thing with the registration and the pre-op.”

Making medical care more convenient for patients is part of his practice’s philosophy, Shats noted.

“Since we opened, our goal has been to make sure that patients can be seen relatively quickly,” he said. “I don’t think that people should wait weeks and months to see their physician or their provider to get their care. Our goal is to get patients in very quickly. When we receive a referral, we aim to get it called in and scheduled the same day and for the patient to come in within a week or so. That’s where we’re trying to differentiate ourselves from other medical practices.”

Shats said primary care doctors who refer patients to them know that they are flexible enough to accommodate visits that may need to take place right away.

“If there’s a patient who needs to be seen urgently, we will make room,” said Shats. “We can see them the same day or the next day. Usually, we can get them faster than the patient is prepared to come in to see us. That’s a goal – we will make room. If something needs to get checked out quickly, we will get it done. We will put them in. Because I don’t feel that patients should have to wait a long time.”

The same holds true for regular office visits, Shats noted.

“We pride ourselves on running an on-time schedule,” he said, noting that he respects his patients’ time. “If a patient is here for an appointment, I do not want a patient to sit out there in the waiting room for an hour to get in. If they have a scheduled time, our goal is to meet that scheduled time. That’s what we really strive for, too.”

Shats said they look forward to being able to undertake scoping procedures under the same roof as the office visits at the new location, as he has been scoping at hospitals since opening the current St. Clairsville office.

Much of the practice focuses on upper endoscopy and colonoscopy.

“There are some other procedures that we can do, like hemorrhoidal treatments as well,” he noted, adding that GI (gastrointestinal) doctors also specialize in treatments for GERD (gastroesophageal reflux disease) and a number of other diseases. “Gastroenterology is not just the stomach and intestines. We’re also liver specialists and pancreas specialists. That’s all part of our purview.”

Shats noted that he is one of few physicians in the area that performs specialized bile duct and liver procedures, as well.

Dealing one-on-one with a private practitioner can be far less stressful than dealing with a large hospital, Shats said.

“We can make decisions for our patients that benefit them without having to go through a large bureaucracy,” he said. “It’s just a conversation between patient and provider. There are no layers of management involved. It’s more personalized and efficient, and it’s sort of a more relaxed and comfortable setting or environment.”

While Shats Gastroenterology is independent, it is connected to the same medical records systems used by WVU Medicine and the other providers. The Epic MyChart digital health platform is one of the greatest improvements and efficiencies that professionals have seen in medical records systems, Shats said.

“So we’re fully integrated into records sharing,” he explained. There’s no time wasted – it’s all under one centralized electronic medical record. So that’s been really great.That type of technological leap for us has been really beneficial.”

New technological advancements in the field with artificial intelligence are helping find better ways to detect polyps in the colon more accurately.

“That prevents colon cancer,” he said.

Raising awareness for things like colon cancer screening is vitally important, Shats stressed, noting that it is one of the most prevalent cancers out there, and regular screenings that catch red flags early can prevent cancer from happening.

“When we find a polyp and remove it, we’re preventing colon cancer from ever happening,” Shats said. “So it’s an excellent screening test. I’m hoping that with increased awareness, more people get their colonoscopies so that we can reduce colon cancer even further.”