Select a group
of patients
SMAs group members generally have a similar health focus, especially for planned SMAs. Most general practices know their high needs patients and who may benefit from participating in SMAs. The hardest part is starting.
Use our patient preparation resources to make things easier.
Selection of patients is usually based on need, disease, symptom, or in some cases cultural need. The clinician identifies patients who would gain additional benefit from a longer consultation in a group setting rather than a 1-1 face-to-face 15-minute consultation.
Groups may be for patients with well controlled or poorly controlled conditions, or mixed. SMA groups can be closed or open, with a process for adding new members. All SMAs need to have specific goals and objectives established for the group such as improved health literacy and self-management, compliance, annual planning of care, reduced disease progression, maintenance of health and wellness.
Set up your practice
templates
Step 1
Select about 25 patients. Only about 50% accept
Step 2
Place an alert on the patients notes
Step 3
Enter a screening term for each patient
Step 4
Patient accepts or declines
Step 5
Send out patient information Package
Step 6
Order tests and diagnostics
Step 7
Run a query on the screening term
Step 8
Follow-up activities that are incomplete
Templates in the practice management system should be set up no later than 4 weeks prior to running the SMA but timing will still be practice specific.
We are recommending that you set up a separate SMA template and align it to the SMA team’s individual templates. See Figure 1.
Nurses and MCA may need more protected time before and after the SMA for the pre and post activities.
Also, we recommended using a Screening Template for each patient to monitor pre-SMA activities and ensure everyone is best prepared for the appointment. See Figure 2.
A monitoring template is provided in this guide for practices who find a paper system easier. A summary of the screening tool after the query has been run is shown in Figure 3.
