Dennis Tankersley, DMSc, PA-C

Dennis is a NCCPA Board Certified Physician Associate licensed in CA as a PA. He is a nationally recognized clinician leader, educator, and healthcare executive with nearly two decades of experience in emergency and urgent care medicine. He is the owner and Director of Clinical Operations of All Valley Urgent Care in Calimesa, which he founded in 2024 to expand timely, community-based access to urgent medical care for Calimesa, Beaumont, Banning, Redlands, and the surrounding communities. LifeTANK grew directly out of that work.

He is perhaps best known nationally as Founding Program Director of the Emergency Medicine PA Fellowship at Arrowhead Regional Medical Center — one of the first postgraduate training programs of its kind in the United States. Over fifteen years he grew it into the largest emergency medicine PA program in the country, setting a standard for education content that has since been replicated nationwide. He also served as Lead PA for Arrowhead's emergency department, behavioral health unit, and San Bernardino County's correctional facilities, overseeing teams of 40–50 advanced practice providers.

PA Tankersley was among the first 200 PAs in the country to earn NCCPA specialty certification in emergency medicine, and he is a published author of peer-reviewed research, book chapters, and clinical guidelines.

I was an athlete in high school and college, and I've been around sports my whole life. I've also spent most of my adult life since medical school carrying more weight than I should. When I was yonger this didn't seem to matter as much, but as i entered my early forties I started to feel the toll it was taking on me. I realized I was less fit than I needed to be to protect my own healthspan. I say that up front because I think it matters, this isn't a subject I came to from the outside, I have lived it.

For most of my career longevity and healthspan where not subjects I paid much attention to. I spent nearly twenty years in emergency medicine caring for patients in a large trauma center, where the focus is the problem in front of you right now. Hormones, body composition, metabolic health — those live on a timescale the emergency department doesn't operate on.

That changed when I opened All Valley Urgent Care in 2024.

Patient after patient came through the door with symptoms that looked like hormonal imbalance. And a great many of the complaints that brought people in — the joint pain, the fatigue, the blood pressure, the sleep, the infections that kept recurring — could have been meaningfully improved, and sometimes resolved outright, by addressing weight and metabolic health. I wasn't well educated in this space yet. But it was obvious these patients needed real help, not another visit for the same problem in six weeks.

So I did what you're supposed to do as an urgent care provider: I told them to bring it up with their primary care provider, their gynecologist, or their endocrinologist if they were already seeing one.

Many of them told me they already had. And they hadn't gotten the help they were looking for.

That stayed with me. We started working on prior authorizations for GLP-1 medications for patients who needed them — a genuinely time-consuming process, and one most offices won't even take on, but in the end we got most of those patients approved. Then I set out to actually learn this field properly. I joined The Menopause Society and worked through their educational material. I completed a certificate course in HRT and attended conferances on sexual medicine and hormone therapy. I've been steadily expanding my patient panel since — reading, researching, and learning from every new patient's particular situation.

It has completely reinvigorated my drive for medical education, and it has turned into a genuine passion. LifeTANK exists because I kept meeting people who deserved a real answer and hadn't been given one.