Shared medical appointments, in which patients receive one-on-one consultations with a physician in the presence of others with similar conditions, can improve outcomes for patients while reducing waiting times and costs, says an expert.

“Patients benefit from interacting with their peers and hearing answers to questions that may be relevant to them. Doctors avoid repeating common advice, which improves their productivity and enables higher-quality interactions with individual patients,” say Kamalini Ramdas, professor of Management Science and Operations, London Business School and Ara Darzi.

“Shared medical appointments have been used successfully by institutions such as the Cleveland Clinic for routine care of chronic conditions for years.”

According to Ramdas and Darzi, the adoption of transformative care delivery requires new strategies – the collection of evidence on their outcomes; finding safe, quick, and cheap ways to experiment; offering incentives to providers; and educating key stakeholders.

Ramdas and Darzi identify four crucial missing components which suggest why the adoption of innovation in mainstream healthcare often faces resistance:

1.    Rigorous scientific evidence supporting the value of shared appointments;

2.    Easy ways to pilot and refine shared-appointments models before applying them in particular care settings;

3.    Regulatory changes or incentives that support the use of such models;

4.    Relevant patient and clinician education–when altering an interaction as unstructured and personal as a doctor visit, patient education is critical. – TradeArabia News Service