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 program 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, program 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. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved) (journal abstract)