Group medical appointments

I saw this article a few months ago, and wanted to ask what you all think about it. I had never heard of this before outside of group therapy.

If you have never heard of this type of thing, what is your initial reaction?

Do you think that it would work better than the current method for certain 'non-embarrassing' health problems? Would you rather be able to talk to the doctor for a longer period of time and hear what other people might ask who also have the same issue you have? Would you trust the other people, or do you think that there should be some type of privacy screen between the patients?

I'm not sure how common it is that there are groups of people who get sick or injured with the same condition in the span of a day or two, but I could see it working for arthritis, kidney stones, and a bunch of other outpatient procedures. Especially if it might cost less.

 

sounds kinda weird to me. I'd rather monopolise the doctor's time. Also, how many times do you go to the doctor and want to talk about multiple things? My GP will also do things like blood pressure when you come in for something else, purely so they can add it to your file (for benchmarking). I have never felt "rush out the door".

 

I'm comfortable with this in the context of a support group but I really can't see how it would work for individual medical issues that require direct provider-patient interaction.
Especially because the "non-embarrassing" can easily flow in to the "embarrassing" before anyone knows it!

 

I wouldn't be comfortable with the doctor trying to examine & diagnose several people at the same time, the potential for them to miss something would be too great. Suppose one persons flu-like symtoms was something more serious than the flu?

 

Group medical appointments would violate HIPAA, so I don't see this happening anytime soon.

 

Everyone else there will be going through the same thing you are going through too though, it wouldn't be for a general checkup or physical. And the Cleveland Clinic is a pretty big hospital that is doing good work, and it already is happening. But, if this frees up doctors from having to explain how to live with type 2 diabetes 20 times a day to individuals and instead can talk to a group of 20 people who could use some more information than what they can get in a quick one-on-one meeting with a busy doctor, I think it could work. I would bet that these classes exist for pregnant mothers-to-be as well to learn how to take care of a baby or the birth process. I would bet that there are other medical issues that would be OK to cover.

Australian and Canadian systems don't quite compare. We have 8-9 times more people here in the US. And doctors here want to see as many patients to get the most money they can.

 

Came here to say this.

There would be a ridiculous amount of paperwork to fill out and process to get around it, so any time "saved" in the group appointments would be lost again in all the paperwork.

 

In physical therapy we are allowed to do group therapy, but all patients must agree to it and any sensitive information transfer must be done separately. This is great for patient education and for group exercise for people with similar diagnoses or injuries, as the group format sometimes allows for better motivation (peer motivation is always better than someone telling you what to do). We had group classes and therapy in the total joint program in one of the hospitals I did a clinical, and people were free to leave it if they wanted.

 

It sounds like what would work best are actually non-physican led groups.
For instance, a Diabetes Education Nurse would be more appropriate at leading a diabetes education group.
Or PT as PonyPotato described above.
I know that what I do with individual patients wouldn't work in a group in terms of actually examining and diagnosing conditions but once people are diagnosed and on a treatment plan the group education could work well. I just don't see a physician as the right person to lead most of those groups.