At times, the community is clearly recognizable as is the case of a geographic community. In other instances, the community is less well defined, for example, the individuals enrolled in a health plan or a school population. Communities share some common social, cultural, economic and political systems. Finally, the COPC process is an important component in the model. It is described as four steps which do not necessarily need to occur sequentially.
Several obstacles exist that have prevented COPC from moving more into the mainstream.
Despite these problems, COPC can be integrated into practice in an incremental way. The staging criteria for COPC functions are presented in Table 1 . Simply identifying the current stage of a practice and moving to the next level can be an effective and feasible prospect. In summary, COPC can be an effective and appropriate model to better manage target communities, especially with regard to prevention. It offers a strategy to market prevention, to maximize resources of a given practice and provide an intellectual base for a primary care practice to go beyond the individual and the disease.