Motivational interviewing‐based health coaching as a chronic care intervention

OBJECTIVE: To evaluate the impact of motivational interviewing-based health coaching on a chronically ill group of participants compared with non-participants. Specifically, measures that could be directly attributed to a health coaching intervention on chronic illness were assessed. DESIGN: Quasi-experimental study design. SETTING: A large medical university in the north-west United States. METHODS: One hundred and six chronically ill programme participants completed a health risk survey instrument prior to enrolment and again at approximately 8 months. Outcomes were compared with 230 chronically ill non-participants who completed the survey twice over a similar time frame. Inverse probability of treatment weights were used in conjunction with the propensity score to correct for selection bias. RESULTS: Compared with non-participants, programme participants improved their self-efficacy (P = 0.01), patient activation (P = 0.02), lifestyle change score (P = 0.01) and perceived health status (P = 0.03). Fewer participants increased their stages of change risk over time than non-participants (P < 0.01), and more participants decreased their stages of change risk over time than non-participants (P = 0.03). CONCLUSION: These results support motivational interviewing-based health coaching as an effective chronic care management intervention in impacting outcome measures that could also serve well as a proxy in the absence of other clinical or cost indices.