One-stop shopping for medical care.

This article presents a profile of the Sault Ste. Marie Group Health Centre in Ontario, Canada. Her regular family doctor wasn't available, so restaurateur Rosetta Sicoli acted on the recommendation of an acquaintance and tried Sault Ste. Marie's Group Health Centre. With 58,000 registered patients on its roster, its strength lies in the full spectrum of what it offers under one roof--from family physicians and specialists to laboratory services, a pharmacy and an eyeglass dispensary--and its impressive degree of personalized care. Health czar Roy Romanow has cited the Sault model as the way of the future. Her two elderly parents, who speak only broken English, get almost all their care at the centre, and their doctors phone Sicoli to update her on their conditions. One of the first larger facilities to get into electronic record-keeping, Group Health's file-searching capabilities have improved treatment for diabetics and helped cut hospital readmissions for congestive heart failure by at least 30 per cent, says Dr. Lewis O' Brien, a family doctor and the lead physician in the electronic data project.