IN-PERSON WORKSHOP: Lifestyle Medicine Shared Medical Appointments - Basic Nuts and Bolts for Success

Workshop Description: Shared Medical Appointments are medical appointments provided to multiple patients in a group setting by a single physician or other health professional, and may include patient education, counseling and group support. Administering shared medical appointments is an essential skill in lifestyle medicine practice. The Lifestyle Medicine Residency Curriculum requires 20 hours spent in group visits. The American College of Lifestyle Medicine is currently sponsoring an expert consensus statement on best practices for SMAs. The USPSTF recommends that those with impaired glucose tolerance and with overweight/obesity and certain risk factors receive intensive multi-component lifestyle intervention, which can be delivered using shared medical appointments. Shared medical appointments have been endorsed by the American Academy of Family Physicians as “a proven, effective method for enhancing a patient’s self-care of chronic conditions, increasing patient satisfaction, and improving outcomes”. Lifestyle medicine shared medical appointments provide an opportunity to provide lifestyle medicine intervention to a larger number of patients and therefore reduce chronic disease. Therefore, it is essential for lifestyle medicine certified physicians and health professionals to become proficient in the delivery of this modality of treatment. However, Shared medical appointments often do not succeed due to provider burnout or discomfort with the format. (Graham et al., 2021) To solve this issue, education on SMAs is essential.

In this workshop, we will describe the implementation of lifestyle medicine shared medical appointments within the Obesity Medicine Clinic UC San Diego Health Center for Digestive Diseases and the Corewell Health Lifestyle Medicine Specialty Practice. We will provide a short introduction on shared medical appointments and discuss at length how to navigate the logistical challenges associated with implementation of lifestyle medicine shared medical appointments, and how to bill insurance. Participants will have the chance to observe a simulated shared medical appointment. They will then break out into groups of beginner and intermediate levels to help participants move into concrete steps for implementation using a SWOT analysis.