SMAs: Key factors for successful implementation

GROUP visits, also called shared medical appointments (SMAs), can offer advantages over traditional one-on-one patient-physician visits. However, few physician offices have successfully implemented this new care model. Specific factors to support SMA uptake are the focus of an article in Population Health Management, a peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers.

The article is available free on the Population Health Management .

“Overcoming Challenges to Adoption of Shared Medical Appointments” explores the factors that facilitated or hindered implementation of SMAs in three separate offices of a large multispecialty physicians group. Mary Honodel McCuistion and colleagues from Essential Anthropology (San Jose, CA), Palo Alto Medical Foundation Research Institute (Mountain View, CA), University of California San Francisco, University of California Los Angeles, and Gordon & Betty Moore Foundation (Palo Alto, CA), co-authored the study.

“Shared medical appointments are an innovative way of speaking to a physician about health,” says editor-in-chief David B. Nash, MD, MBA, dean and Dr. Raymond C. and Doris N. Grandon professor, Jefferson School of Population Health, Philadelphia, PA. “SMAs are especially valuable to people dealing with chronic conditions, such as asthma, diabetes, and hypertension.”