Find a Top Emergency Medicine Doctor Near Me in Knoxville, TN – Book an Appointment Instantly

Welcome to Watershed Medical Group. Daniel Leverenz, DO, G. Brooks Covert, MD, and Jonathan Koerten, MD, built this practice around a belief that healthcare should help you stay well, not just treat you when you’re not. 

We take a proactive approach to your health, focusing on prevention, early detection, and long-term vitality.

When you partner with us, we look at the full picture. Using a variety of tools, we create a personalized plan to match your goals and lifestyle.

We're passionate about addressing your risk factors before they become diseases. Whether that’s supporting your metabolic health, improving your digestive function, optimizing your sleep, or helping you lose weight, we find the source of the issue.

If you're already dealing with a chronic condition, we take a disease-reversal and functional health optimization approach to help you achieve better health with proven strategies.

Patient education is the cornerstone of our care. We help you understand why our recommendations matter, so you feel confident making decisions about your health. We give you the tools to take ownership of your well-being.

To stay ahead of illnesses and move toward a healthier life, book an appointment online with Watershed Medical Group.  We are incredibly excited to start this journey with you.

Jonathan Koerten, MD, is a preventive care physician seeing patients at Watershed Medical Group in Knoxville, Tennessee. Dr. Koerten spent his career in emergency medicine treating the downstream consequences of problems that, in many cases, should have been prevented years earlier.

Night after night, he witnessed the same patterns – metabolic disease, cardiovascular events, preventable complications – showing up earlier, progressing faster, and requiring more intervention than ever before. The system is highly effective at responding to crises, but it rarely intervenes early enough to change the trajectory. 

That realization fundamentally changed how Dr. Koerten thought about healthcare.

In addition to his work as a board-certified emergency physician, he serves as the Medical Director for event medicine at the University of Tennessee, where he helps design and lead medical coverage for high-performance environments – athletics, endurance events, and large-scale venues. These experiences have reinforced a different perspective: when you combine preparation, data, and the right systems, you can dramatically improve outcomes before problems ever occur.  

That same principle applies to individual health.

Dr. Koerten co-founded Watershed Medical Group to build a model of care that is proactive, personalized, and rooted in measurable results.  Our approach integrates advanced diagnostics, targeted interventions, and ongoing coaching to help clients improve energy, performance, and long-term health – while reducing reliance on reactive, late-stage care. 

This is not about simply avoiding disease.  It's about optimizing how people feel and function – physically, mentally, and over the long term. 

Dr. Koerten's focus is on building systems that make this level of care practical, scalable, and accessible. With the right data, the right plan, and consistent execution, it's possible to change the trajectory of health in a meaningful and lasting way. 

Outside of medicine, Dr. Koerten spends most of his time with his family.  His faith is a central part of his life and shapes how he approaches his work, his relationships, and his commitment to serving others. Dr. Koerten values staying active, engaged, and present – principles that also guide how he thinks about health, performance, and longevity. 

Daniel Leverenz, DO, is a physician and co-founder of Watershed Medical Group in Knoxville, Tennessee, where he focuses on personalized preventive care, lifestyle medicine, and health coaching. He is certified as an Emergency Physician by the American Board of Emergency Medicine and has been in practice since 2011.

As a board-certified emergency physician in practice for 15 years, Dr. Leverenz, in many respects, "has seen it all." 

He views it as an extraordinary experience to reflect on the tremendous diversity of situations and forms of suffering that he's encountered through the years. He considers it one of his life's deepest honors and privileges to stand ready to render competent and compassionate aid to so many people in moments of extreme crisis and fear.

As he has reflected on his career, however, an obvious and unavoidable theme emerged: The substantial majority of illnesses and problems he witnesses day after day in the emergency department need not exist at all. Forty-year-olds with young families are having heart attacks or going on dialysis. Fifty-year-olds are in nursing homes. People in their twenties, who should be enjoying the prime of their lives, are instead developing metabolic disorders that will haunt them for decades, blossoming prematurely into multifaceted diseases, years of unnecessary suffering, long medication lists, recurrent hospitalizations, and early deaths. People in their sixties are experiencing the consequences of inordinate frailty and chronic disease when they should be enjoying the fruits of retirement and time with their families.  

None of this is inevitable. None of this is necessary.

Most of contemporary healthcare is based on a "rescue" model of treatment and intervention. "Treatment" often only begins when a disease is already present. Too often, nothing happens until diagnosis, and, like a perverse ouroboros, diagnosis can only occur when disease exists. In other words, disease is the activation switch that finally turns on the machinery of modern medicine. Before that, nothing happens, and the machine stays quiet.

This, in Dr. Leverenz's opinion, is far too passive.  This is why he, along with two friends and like-minded partners, founded Watershed Medical Group.

Dr. Leverenz is passionate about creating and perfecting a new model of healthcare focused entirely on prevention, health optimization, and the reversal of disease and dysfunction by addressing their root causes.  There will always be a role for rescue and treatment, but virtually all existing medical infrastructure is already devoted to that model, and there is little need for reinforcement. Watershed Medical Group exists to amplify a paradigm shift in the way we care for people: proactively, with the exclusive aim of keeping people healthy, not just trying to fix them when they get sick.

We have profoundly impactful ways of identifying risk, and we have learned a tremendous amount about how to keep people healthy and functionally optimized. Dr. Leverenz is obsessed with the idea that, with the right investigations, the right planning, and the right coaching, we can keep our clients healthy and robust even into their old age. He thinks about grandmothers in their seventies, strong and stable, able to hold their grandchildren for bear hugs and go for all-day hikes in the Smokies with their friends. He thinks about rewriting the script for so many of the young people he's taken care of over the years; instead of admitting them to the hospital for urgent heart tests or other interventions, he imagines them living robust, medication-free lives, playing basketball with their children and actively engaged in hobbies they love, feeling great and confident that their long-term health is taken care of.

Dr. Leverenz wants Watershed to have a massive impact. He wants our clients to experience profound, life-changing improvements in their health and reap the benefits of optimal health and function for decades. He wants to perfect this model, retooling and revising our methodology as necessary, and wants the model to spread and be available everywhere, for everyone. Health is so much more than just the absence of disease.  It means that your body and your mind are strong, fully ready for whatever you're passionate about, whatever you want to do, whatever life throws at you. It means you get to live life on your terms. Dr. Leverenz wants this for everyone.

Dr. Leverenz lives with his three wildly beloved children in South Knoxville and is passionate about too many things to list: family, cooking, reading, whitewater, traveling, hiking, climbing, mountain biking, poetry, flowers, rivers, and safeguarding ecosystems are just a few.