Community Medicine

Enhancing Community Wellness

Integrative medicine has emerged as a transformative approach to healthcare that combines conventional medical practices with complementary therapies and mind-body interventions. Its holistic nature treats patients as individuals, empowering them to take charge of their well-being. It is time to bring the benefits of integrative medicine to our community, fostering a culture of wellness and resilience.

Group Medical Visits

Group of seven people sitting around a large wooden table in a modern office, engaged in conversation, with a woman working on a laptop in the background.

What is it?

A shared medical appointment, also known as a group visit, occurs when multiple patients are seen as a group for follow-up care or management of chronic conditions. These visits are voluntary for patients and provide a secure but interactive setting in which patients have improved access to their physicians, the benefit of counseling with additional members of a health care team (for example a behaviorist, nutritionist, or health educator), and can share experiences and advice with one another.

People exercising outdoors with some running and others stretching or warming up, surrounded by trees and sunlight.

What are the benefits

  • Reduced health care costs

  • Greater patient and clinician satisfaction

  • Patient empowerment

  • Greater patient compliance

  • Reduced repeat hospital admissions

  • Fewer emergency room and sub-specialist visits

Randomized trials have shown that diabetic patients involved in group visits achieved better HbA1c levels than patients in a control group.

Other studies of group education in diabetes have also found that HbA1c levels in the intervention groups were better than those of control groups; they also found evidence of improvements in patient self-care and satisfaction, self-efficacy, and body weight and non-fasting triglyceride levels.

Studies show that patients were more satisfied with their care; had lower care costs; and had fewer ER visits, sub-specialist visits, and calls to physicians. Also, participating physicians were more satisfied with caring for older patients than comparison physicians who relied on standard one-to-one interactions with their patients