Overview

Clinical Health Coach® training onsite

More than 145 million people – or nearly half all Americans – live with chronic conditions. Hospitals, clinics and providers within our communities face the common challenge of serving and caring for an increasing number of patients with chronic conditions, many with multiple chronic conditions. Successfully managing chronic conditions is complex. Thirty to fifty percent of patients leave their provider visits without understanding their treatment plan, and hospitalized patients retain only 10 percent of their discharge teaching instructions. Better strategies of engaging and communicating with patients must be implemented to improve health outcomes. True engagement involves an important shift by healthcare providers from “teaching and telling” to “listening and engaging”.

The Clinical Health Coach® Training Program is a 5-week experience designed for healthcare professionals who desire to attain skills in chronic care management through proactive, patient-centered strategies. The curriculum builds on the philosophy that patients are the greatest untapped resource in reclaiming responsibility for their own health. However, healthcare organizations must transform to new models of care to address the current fragmentation of services and lack of care coordination. Within this new structure, there is a role for an emerging supportive role, the “Clinical Health Coach.”


Purpose/Learning Goal

The Clinical Health Coach Training Program is an interactive and gestational learning experience designed to build care management strategies, enhance leadership and communication skills, and develop health coaching skills that result in improved health, clinical and behavioral outcomes and business efficiency. The Clinical Health Coach Training Program helps healthcare organizations better manage the ever-growing number of patients with chronic care conditions. The program is an outcome-based platform that encourages more active patient engagement through coaching and education. The result is a more well-informed patient and family better prepared to navigate their health through the entire continuum of care.


Training Intent for the Clinical Health Coach®

  • Develop health coaching skills including motivational interviewing, reflective listening, readiness assessments, goal setting, and engaging patients to be effective self-managers
  • Utilize behavior-change theories and the health belief model as a foundation for practice
  • Improve health literacy through effective communications strategies (FLEX Care)
  • Provide resources, referrals and education to assist “evidence-based patient choice” decisions
  • Promote care coordination and care transitions as needed, to address the care continuum from acute care to home and community-based chronic care management
  • Develop leadership skills to create a population health approach to the elevation of quality improvement, clinical improvement and health status improvement of those served
  • Serve as change agents in building healthcare teams to improve care processes
  • Explore the utilization of registries in identifying care planning and outcomes reporting for patients

The Clinical Health Coach® Role

The role of the Clinical Health Coach® is valuable in many healthcare organizations, and there may be differences in how each chooses to use clinical health coaching skills. The ICCC Clinical Health Coach® Training Program teaches to “competencies” versus a specific job description in order to afford flexibility within the job function. The goal of the program is to integrate health coaching skills into the clinical setting. By learning these competency skills, the professional can most easily adapt to the structure and culture of the organization. Competencies are focused primarily around coaching and communications skills, and also include care management strategies and leadership training.