Revit Nursing Home

I've been working on this large Revit project more.  It's a nursing home with various wings and corridors and such.  Many of the rooms are the exact same layout or very similar.  Knowing our company, I knew there would be many design changes from the point I started working.  I found a time-saver called Groups. I could lay out a typical patient room with the lights, outlets, fire alarm, whatnot and copy this whole thing as one piece to an identical room.  What's better is that I could layout tags in a group too.  Now if the rooms need something different, I just had to edit one room and all the others would update.  GENIUS!!!
Not so much.  Groups have slowed the model down to a crawl.  It takes 30+ minutes to open.  Updating a group like in the above situation takes another 30 minutes.  It looks nice though, all the rooms looks exactly like each other, symmetry.
What's the solution?  Un-group everything is one option.  It will leave the items where they are, but changes won't copy to the other rooms.  Things could still change, so this isn't good.  One thing I read was to make it a family.  I really don't think that will work.  These rooms have multiple walls and a ceiling with elements all over... Plus the groups are made already and it would be a lot of work to erase all my groups and replace them with families.  None of these work for me at the moment.  I have to keep these pain-inducing groups for now.  I don't close Revit at the end of night.  Opening it takes too much out of the day.  I save over 2 hours a week by leaving it open.
Lesson learned.