IN-PERSON WORKSHOP: How Primary Care Practices Can Use Lifestyle Medicine to Thrive Financially

Workshop Description: Lifestyle medicine clinicians increasingly recognize that while evidence-based lifestyle interventions improve health outcomes, many primary care practices struggle to sustain these services financially and operationally. Traditional visit-based reimbursement models often undervalue prevention, longitudinal behavior change, and team-based care, contributing to clinician burnout, fragmented workflows, and under-delivery of comprehensive lifestyle medicine. This three-hour interactive workshop addresses a critical gap in current practice: how to design and operate a financially viable, prevention-centered primary care model that supports high-quality lifestyle medicine while reducing clinician and staff burnout.

The workshop is designed for physicians, advanced practice clinicians, health coaches, administrators, and healthcare leaders who are actively practicing or planning to implement lifestyle medicine in primary care settings. Content will be applicable across a range of practice environments, including independent practices, group practices, FQHCs, and health system–affiliated clinics.

Participants will explore how to reframe primary care delivery around preventive services and longitudinal care management rather than episodic, problem-focused visits. A core emphasis will be placed on organizing practices around zero-cost annual wellness visits (AWVs) as a gateway to comprehensive prevention, risk stratification, and lifestyle-focused care planning. Attendees will learn how AWVs can serve as a foundational entry point for identifying patients who may benefit from ongoing care management services, including advanced primary care management and behavioral health care management, while remaining compliant with current regulations and ethical standards.

The workshop will provide a practical, non-proprietary overview of revenue-generating preventive and care management services that align with lifestyle medicine principles. These include advanced primary care management models, behavioral health care management, chronic care management, and selective use of remote patient monitoring where clinically appropriate. Rather than focusing on billing tactics alone, the session will emphasize how these services support longitudinal relationships, address root causes of disease, and enable sustained behavior change when implemented thoughtfully.

Through a combination of didactic teaching, case-based discussion, and small-group exercises, participants will examine real-world practice scenarios to understand how staffing models, documentation workflows, and team roles can be structured to support these services without increasing administrative burden. Attention will be given to delineating responsibilities among clinicians, care managers, health coaches, and behavioral health professionals to ensure that each team member practices at the top of their license while maintaining a patient-centered, equity-focused approach.

Burnout prevention and workforce sustainability are central themes throughout the workshop. Participants will explore how misaligned incentives, time pressure, and excessive clerical work contribute to moral injury in primary care, and how prevention-centered care models can instead support professional fulfillment. The workshop will highlight structural strategies that reduce burnout, such as redistributing cognitive and administrative tasks, designing predictable care management workflows, and aligning clinical effort with meaningful patient outcomes.

In addition to operational considerations, the workshop will address how to measure success in a lifestyle medicine practice beyond traditional productivity metrics. Participants will discuss practical indicators of success, including patient engagement, adherence to lifestyle interventions, continuity of care, and early outcome signals that are meaningful to patients, clinicians, and payers alike. Emphasis will be placed on maintaining integrity, avoiding commercial bias, and ensuring that all approaches discussed are replicable without reliance on proprietary tools or products.

The learning experience will be highly interactive. Attendees will engage in guided exercises to map their current practice models, identify gaps between desired and actual care delivery, and outline a realistic 90-day roadmap for incremental practice redesign. Peer discussion will allow participants to learn from diverse practice contexts and share practical solutions to common challenges.

By the conclusion of the workshop, participants will leave with a clearer understanding of how to operationalize lifestyle medicine within primary care in a way that is financially sustainable, ethically sound, and aligned with adult learning and behavior change principles. They will gain actionable strategies to redesign workflows, optimize preventive services, and support both patient outcomes and clinician well-being, empowering them to advance lifestyle medicine as a durable foundation of modern primary care.

Pre- and post-conference workshops are an additional $159 each for ACLM members and $259 each for non-members.