Practice Profile: Griffin Concierge Medical

Cutting-edge practices like Griffin Concierge Medical are using Spruce to make their operational workflows and communications more modern, efficient, and delightful. In this installment of Practice Profiles, we’re highlighting the Griffin team and sharing their tips for what they’ve found to be the biggest and best technology game changers.

About Griffin Concierge Medical

Practice Name: Griffin Concierge Medical
Practice Location: Tampa, FL
Practice Type: Concierge and direct primary care
Team Size: 7 (2 physicians, 1 PA-C, 2 nurses, 2 care coordinators)
Years in Current Practice: 10
Panel Size: 650

Q+A with Dr. Radley Griffin

Spruce: What is your favorite part of practicing concierge and direct-care medicine?

Dr. Griffin: The concierge/direct-care model allows us to focus on disease prevention and reversal. This is accomplished on many levels, starting with the relationship with our patients. When you know your patients so well that they are practically considered family, there is even more incentive to keep them healthy.

I also enjoy the collaboration with my specialist colleagues, which I didn’t have as much of in my prior practice. Being able to discuss my patients with specialists enhances our knowledge and saves our patients from unnecessary and redundant testing, medication interaction, and fruitless specialty visits.

Spruce: How has telemedicine enhanced your practice?

Dr. Griffin: Direct primary care is all about the relationship, and telemedicine technologies, including those on Spruce, enhance the doctor-patient relationship. Telemedicine better connects us to the patient and their data, and so much is possible after that.

Spruce: What percentage of your patients text or secure message you? How do you keep that organized and have “off time”?

Dr. Griffin: The majority of our patients are communicating with us digitally (email, text, portal) because we encourage them to. We know that this approach allows us to provide the best care and service for them, and having Spruce as a consolidated channel for all of it keeps us organized.

Spruce also allows our docs to unplug. Taking call and coverage is so much easier now. When I’m not on call, I turn off patient notifications, but my colleagues can page me via Spruce if I’m needed. If a patient texts my personal cell phone, I forward the message to the Spruce platform so that the on-call physician can address it.

Spruce: What made you look for a unified communication platform?

Dr. Griffin: In the concierge world, it is so important for our practice to know both our own patients and also what’s going on with other people’s patients. Everyone’s email is not connected; cell phones are not connected. In our space, we don’t want redundancies, but we don’t want to drop the ball, either.

What I was craving was exactly what Spruce was going to deliver: consolidation of communication. We’ve been thrilled with it.

Spruce: What has been most helpful about using Spruce?

Dr. Griffin: Spruce is a game changer for patient connectivity. In concierge medicine, we’re in constant communication with patients and each other, and Spruce puts all of that in one place. It gives us a consistent way to connect with our patients and an easy way for them to communicate back.

Before Spruce, you would send an email. Now, it’s so easy to text somebody. Too often you don’t do it because the number isn’t saved, but now that’s not the case. Part of our infrastructure is our friendly touches, and we can do those better with Spruce. I can’t encourage enough practices to adopt the platform; I don’t know if we could exist without it.

Spruce has also helped our team stay cohesive. From a multiple-provider perspective, it’s allowed us to stay on top of what’s going on with each other’s patients. There’s a benefit in quality assurance there, too, because we can see how every team member is responding to patients.