Medicine & Health

Updates every hour. Last Updated: 23-Oct-2026 09:16 ET (23-Oct-2026 13:16 GMT/UTC)

21-Sep-2026

New care model that includes longer visits aims to reach patients before they need emergency or hospital services

American Academy of Family Physicians
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Medicaid patients have mounting care needs, poorly managed chronic conditions and often socioeconomic barriers that keep them from preventive care. The ambulatory care department at Jamaica Hospital Medical Center, a safety-net hospital serving an under-resourced, heavily Medicaid population in Queens, New York, introduced a new care delivery model to reach these patients earlier.

Journal

The Annals of Family Medicine

21-Sep-2026

Prescribers face barriers and confusion to providing prescription medication instructions for patients

American Academy of Family Physicians
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Pharmacies that receive federal funds must provide language support to make sure patients can understand their medication instructions. A survey of 169 outpatient prescribers at a large academic medical center found widespread uncertainty about how language support actually works.

Journal

The Annals of Family Medicine

21-Sep-2026

“Learning tour” connects primary care clinicians with practice based-research network resources

American Academy of Family Physicians
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Between 2023 and 2025, CO-OP leaders and staff made 36 “Learning Tours” visits, reaching 82 primary care sites and more than 300 clinicians, medical directors and staff across northern New England and bordering states.

Journal

The Annals of Family Medicine

21-Sep-2026

Patients with chronic pain may benefit from group medical visits

American Academy of Family Physicians
Peer-Reviewed Publication

More than one in five U.S. adults lives with chronic pain, which isolation and stigma can worsen. Group medical visits allow multiple patients with a common condition to receive care alongside health education and peer support. This study examined how group medical visits facilitate four types of social support: emotional, appraisal, informational, and instrumental.

Journal

The Annals of Family Medicine

21-Sep-2026

Combining PEth alcohol biomarker and self-reported measures may help identify dangerous patient alcohol use

American Academy of Family Physicians
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Phosphatidylethanol (PEth) is a blood alcohol biomarker that can provide an alternative approach to identifying hazardous alcohol use in primary care by reflecting alcohol consumption over preceding weeks. Researchers in Sweden used health record data from 2013 to 2023 to examine the alignment between patients’ two self-reported measures of alcohol use and PEth tests.

Journal

The Annals of Family Medicine

21-Sep-2026

Reorganizing large clinics into small teams for chronic disease care may lower costs

American Academy of Family Physicians
Peer-Reviewed Publication

A study comparing 22,632 teamlet patients with at least one chronic condition against 163,055 similar patients who received usual care from 2014 to 2021 found that the teamlet model was associated with decreased overall health care costs for people with chronic disease over six years.

Journal

The Annals of Family Medicine

21-Sep-2026

Annals of Family Medicine tip sheet September/October 2026 issue

American Academy of Family Physicians
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Annals of Family Medicine New Research, September/October 2026 Issue

Journal

The Annals of Family Medicine

21-Sep-2026

Family medicine residents working in teams continuing quality improvement projects across classes are more likely to change patient care

American Academy of Family Physicians
Peer-Reviewed Publication

There is no standard curriculum or metric for evaluating success of family residency quality improvement (QI) projects. A survey of 321 U.S. family medicine residency program directors asked how programs teach QI and who supervises projects. The survey also asked whether residents can get to clinic data, how projects are organized, and what the projects achieve.

Journal

The Annals of Family Medicine

21-Sep-2026

Physician warmth and competence may help patients worry less over normal test results

American Academy of Family Physicians
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Communicating normal test results that reveal no abnormalities isn’t always enough to ease a patient’s worries. In this study, researchers asked 349 participants to imagine having gastrointestinal symptoms and a relative recently diagnosed with bowel cancer. Participants then watched one of four videos in which a physician delivered the same identical normal test results.

Journal

The Annals of Family Medicine