Shannon Dowler, MD, CPE, is a board certified Family Physician and Fellow from Asheville, NC. She serves as Chief of Community Medicine and Ambulatory Population Health at Mission Health System. She is Chair of the North Carolina Physician Advisory Group, advising DHHS on Clinical Policy for the Medicaid Program. At the national level, she serves on the American Academy of Family Physicians Committee on Health of the Public and Science, and the Subcommittees on Health Equity and Public Health Issues, and is the AAFP representative to the American College of OB-GYN (ACOG) Adolescent Health committee. She is an Adjunct Associate Professor with the UNC School of Medicine Department of Family Medicine.
Prior to recently assuming her current role, Dr. Dowler served as Associate Chief Quality Officer for Mission Health System and guided the development and implementation of Care Process Models, tools to reduce unnecessary clinical variation in care and improve overall outcomes. Using advanced analytics, they were able to move and optimize clinical performance on 85 different clinical care processes in the past several years. Prior to joining Mission Health System, Dr. Dowler served as the Chief Medical Officer for a large, multicounty community health center in WNC and partnered to develop a Teaching Health Center during her tenure there.
An advocate for health equity and the intentional reduction of health disparities, Dr. Dowler maintains a small panel of patients and helps staff the walk in primary care clinic as well as a clinic every week at the health department seeing patients in the Sexually Transmitted Disease clinic. She enjoys public speaking at the local, state and national level to both lay and professional medical audiences on topics related to STD’s. Known by the moniker, RapDktaD, her educational rap video "STDs Never Get Old" achieved brief international acclaim in March of 2017.