Giving high-risk patients access to an obesity specialist through their regular primary care clinic increased their chances of receiving at least one evidence-based weight-management treatment, and led to more weight lost in just a year, a new University of Michigan study finds. Primary care clinicians commonly struggle to help patients develop an individualized weight-management treatment plan during short clinic visits. Previous U-M research showed that most primary care patients with obesity do not lose at least 5% of their body weight, a goal that's been shown to reduce obesity-related health risks.
That's why U-M's academic medical center, Michigan Medicine, developed the Weight Navigation Program, which teams up patients with obesity and their primary care provider with a board-certified obesity specialist. The new study evaluating results from it is published in JAMA Network Open by the multidisciplinary team that launched the WNP in fall 2020. The new study shows that on average, patients who enrolled during the first year of the program lost about 12 pounds, or about 4.
4% of their body weight, in the year after they received an individualized obesity treatment plan from an obesity specialist. That's compared with very little weight lost by patients similar to the WNP patients who went to a similar U-M primary care clinic that didn't yet offer the program. On average, all the patients started with a body mass index (BMI) around 40 kg/m 2 .
To qualify for WNP, patients.