The Future of Healthcare Is People-to-People: What Group Medical Visits Teach Us About Capacity, Community, and Care

Featuring insights from Dr. Jeffrey Geller and Dr. Paula Gardiner, Integrated Center for Group Medical Visits

Across the country, healthcare is straining under the weight of demand it simply cannot meet. No amount of individual appointments can address the scale of loneliness, chronic disease, behavioral health needs, and workforce burnout that continues to grow. Yet right in front of us is a solution that is both ancient and innovative: bringing people together in groups.

Group-based care is not new. Humans have gathered in circles to heal, grieve, learn, and grow since long before we built modern medical systems. What is new is the recognition that groups are not a luxury or an alternative. They are a scalable, sustainable, evidence-informed response to the gaps in our current system. When implemented well, group care strengthens communities, lightens the load on clinicians, reduces costs, and improves outcomes. It is both a clinical intervention and a human one.

In recent conversations with Dr. Jeffrey Geller and Dr. Paula Gardiner from the Integrated Center for Group Medical Visits (ICGMV)—two leaders who have spent decades designing and running medical group visits—one theme emerged repeatedly: The people-to-people model works. It meets needs that traditional systems cannot. It unlocks capacity without sacrificing quality. And perhaps most importantly, it reconnects patients, clinicians, and communities to one another.

Why Group Care Scales Where Traditional Models Cannot

Individual care relies on one provider serving one patient within a limited window of time. Group care shifts this equation entirely. A single clinician, social worker, or trained facilitator can anchor a support group where participants learn from one another, share lived experience, and build relationships that often become just as healing as the clinical guidance itself.

As Dr. Geller reflected, “I started my groups as a treatment for loneliness. And now the world has caught up.” His decades of running group visits across conditions, from chronic disease to behavioral health to “disguised” anxiety groups like kickboxing, show the same consistent pattern: People feel less alone, more supported, and more capable when they face challenges together.

This shared experience also shifts the economics of care. “These group visits seem to be key to generating revenue in terms of preventing illness,” he noted. In a system slowly moving toward value-based care, groups deliver what payers and policymakers say they want: scalable prevention, reduced costs, and measurable improvement.

What it Takes to Make Group Care Safe and Effective

While the benefits are clear, Dr. Gardiner, a physician and researcher at Cambridge Health Alliance, emphasized that effective group care requires a deep shift in training and mindset. “Clinicians are still trained in hierarchical, one-on-one models,” she said. “Bringing someone with no group training into that setting can break trust. It can cause harm.”

Her research has shown that group visits succeed only when clinicians learn to:
• Share power rather than control
• Facilitate rather than direct
• Listen more than they speak
• Create a trauma-responsive environment where people feel safe to participate

Without this cultural shift, group care risks becoming another rushed clinical task. With it, groups become transformative.

The Power of Peer Pathways

Both leaders highlighted another essential feature of the model: groups create their own future workforce.

“We’ve worked with our patients to get them to become peer facilitators,” Dr. Geller explained. “Alumni come back and sit in the group as leaders.”

These peer pathways expand workforce capacity, especially at a time when healthcare is struggling to recruit and retain clinicians. They bring lived experience, empathy, and cultural knowledge—qualities that deepen the effect of group care and help patients feel understood.

Building the Evidence for What Communities Already Know

Even with decades of success, the field is still developing a shared evidence base. “We are still creating the literature and the evidence,” Dr. Gardiner noted. “They’re still saying ‘show me the evidence,’ and shared outcomes are the next step.”

ICGMV is now working toward standardized measures across group programs nationally. Their efforts—along with training, annual conferences, and more than 130 presentations—are building the foundation for group care to be recognized as a mainstream model, not a niche innovation.

As we look toward the future, the question is not whether group care can fit into the healthcare system. The question is how quickly we can redesign the system around what we already know works.

A people-to-people model acknowledges that connection is not peripheral to health, it is central. Loneliness is as dangerous as smoking. Trauma cannot be healed in isolation. Burnout cannot be solved through ten-minute appointments. But in group settings with skilled facilitation, trauma-informed design, and sustainable reimbursement, healthcare becomes something more expansive. Healing becomes shared. Capacity multiplies. Community becomes part of the solution.

A GPS Reflection

At GPS Group Peer Support, these insights echo what we witness every day in our programs across Massachusetts and beyond. Groups restore people’s ability to breathe, connect, and keep going. They ground clinicians and healthcare workers who are carrying more than they ever expected. They create leaders out of participants. And they remind all of us that healing is not meant to be a solitary act.

Listening to Dr. Geller and Dr. Gardiner affirmed what GPS has always believed: the future of mental and emotional health lies in shared spaces, shared wisdom, and shared humanity. A people-to-people system is not a hopeful idea—it is already happening. Our task now is to strengthen it, scale it, and ensure that everyone who needs connection can find it.

Dr. Jeffrey Geller has practiced and innovated community-based healthcare in Lawrence, MA since 1996 and is nationally recognized for pioneering group medical visits to address loneliness, improve access, and reduce health barriers. A former president of IM4US and 2020 Massachusetts Family Physician of the Year, he continues this work through ICGMV and Kronos Health to transform primary care delivery.

Dr. Paula Gardiner is an Associate Professor of Family Medicine at UMass Medical School and a national leader in group medical visits, integrative medicine, and health equity, currently serving as Director of Primary Care Implementation Research at Cambridge Health Alliance’s Center for Mindfulness and Compassion.

The Integrated Center for Group Medical Visits (ICGMV) is a non-profit dedicated to reducing health disparities in underserved communities using the power of group medical visits.

Bring MASStrong to Your Workplace

GPS’s MASStrong program offers free GPS trainings, support groups, curriculums, and toolkits for Massachusetts medical, behavioral health, and community care workers and organizations. Eligible organizations can also apply for GPS partnership support and grants up to $10,000.