Welcome home
New Family Medicine at Main offers medical home for area residents
By John Pastor
Offering a “personal medical home” for the whole family, UF&Shands Family Medicine at Main opened in July at a sprawling, modern complex with enough patient space to provide for the primary medical care needs of area residents.
The new UF Physicians practice represents approximately an $8 million investment into East Gainesville by UF&Shands, the University of Florida Academic Health Center, and marks the relocation of services from Family Medicine at Fourth Avenue.
Family Medicine at Main will offer care for the whole family, including pregnant patients and children. The two-story, 24,200-square-foot facility at 1707 N. Main St. is 40 percent larger than the former Fourth Avenue practice and contains 25 exam rooms, two procedure rooms and designated rooms for group visits and counseling.
“It is important for Gainesville residents to have a personal medical home where they can access comprehensive health care close to where they live and work, and we are honored that our faculty and staff can answer that need,” said David S. Guzick, M.D., Ph.D., senior vice president for health affairs and president of the UF&Shands Health System.
A personal medical home is a health care setting that optimizes relationships between individual patients, personal physicians and, when appropriate, families. In this model, a personal physician leads a team of professionals who are responsible for the ongoing care of a patient.
A 2004 Annals of Family Medicine study estimated if every American used a primary care physician, health care costs would likely decrease by 5.6 percent, resulting in national savings of $67 billion per year and improvement in the overall quality of health care.
Approximately 25,000 patient visits are expected the first year at Family Medicine at Main. It will be staffed by 10 UF College of Medicine physicians, 28 resident physicians, two sports medicine fellows, a faculty member from the College of Pharmacy, a licensed clinical social worker and a nurse midwife.