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Shared medical visits are made up a group of patients with similar health conditions and a health care team, physically or virtually.
A shared medical visit should have 10 to 20 patients per group visit.
This number has proven to be the most ideal for group visits for a few reasons:
The 60-120 minutes per shared medical visit is ideal for effectively addressing group concerns, having the physician address the group and take questions and answers.
For the physician it is more worthwhile to see this number of people in that time frame because of the added benefit of addressing the group at once versus repeating the information in individual group meetings.
The higher number 20 is to prevent overwhelming the physician with too many questions from the patients.
According to research, this number also is the most ideal for the patients because a number over may reduce patient participation as it becomes a crowd instead of a small group setting.
A virtual group visit may be able to accommodate a larger group of patients. In larger health practices it is not uncommon to find much larger group visits as they are better able to allocate a team and have space available for the group.
However, the most common practice is 10-12 patients per group.