Introduction to Group Visits

Would you be interested in a care delivery model that could simultaneously increase productivity, access, and efficiency; improve patient education, prevention, and chronic disease management; enhance quality, clinical outcomes, and the patient’s healing experience; more closely attend to mind as well as body needs—psychosocial needs that are known to drive a large percentage of all medical visits; control costs while max-packing visits and providing patients with a one-stop healthcare shopping experience; deliver consistently high levels of patient and physician professional satisfaction and bring some joy back into the practice of medicine; increase job performance by optimally off-loading as many provider responsibilities as possible onto less costly members of a multidisciplinary care team; provide a value-added service that offered more time with the provider and a more relaxed pace of care; made use of the greatest untapped resource in every healthcare system (i.e., the patients themselves, not only in their own disease self-management, but also in helping, encouraging, and supporting each other)? If so, then read on.

It’s called a group visit, and it’s the latest twist on the most fundamental encounter in medicine: the doctor–patient relationship. Health clinics across the country, from a Mayo Clinic affiliate in Wisconsin to Stanford University School of Medicine in California, have recently introduced programs…Some doctors set up their group visits around patients with specific chronic ailments—such as diabetes, arthritis or hypertension, or for routine pediatric or geriatric complains. Fallon Clinic Inc., Worcester, Mass., has such visits, and its medical director, Jonathan Harding, praises their efficiency. Rather than saying the same thing 20 different times to 20 different patients, he says, the doctor only has to say it once. Though it seems paradoxical, both doctors and patients maintain the arrangement reclaims the closeness of the doctor–patient relationship that many argue has been eroded in the era of managed care.

Martinez B. Now it’s mass medicine—doctors start seeing groups of patients to save time; one-on-one vs. one-on-12. Wall Street Journal Monday, August 21, 2000; p. B1.