For Practitioners
Many health-care practices, as well as large medical organizations like the VA and Medicare, are utilizing NBC-HWCs to improve patient efficacy and compliance.
PRACTITIONERS: How A Health Coach Can Benefit Your Patients and Your Practice
When you prescribe eating better, exercising more or reducing stress, do your patients know how to do that? Will they do that? Motivation is hard to summon and very fickle. Evidence demonstrates that integrating a National Board Certified Health & Wellness Coach (NBC-HWC) into your patients’ care team (or prescribing these services as an outboard option) can increase patient satisfaction and engagement – and also reduce physician stress and burnout by freeing up time.
A health coach can help your patients define their aspirations, choose small achievable behaviors and then break those down into specific, actionable steps that become long-term small habits that lead to the accomplishment of the goals you wish for them. Employing tools from several behavior design models, I encourage the process of making change – and making it stick.
With this type of focused teamwork patients understand the management of their treatment and your lifestyle recommendations, and are actively engaged in their own health care. This can work in concierge practices as well as those catering to high-needs population— whether on Medicaid, uninsured or underinsured.*
Virtual Coaching & Telehealth The growth of telehealth also broadens the opportunities for practitioners to partner with board-certified health coaches to help manage patients with chronic issues and to promote healthier lifestyles. Health coaches are being looked at as an essential part of the team as more medical practices offer virtual collaborative care models and other patient-centered monitoring systems employing data-driven Artificial Intelligence. I have been “virtual coaching” on ZOOM for two years and have found it as effective as in-person – and often more focused.
Food as Medicine & Plant Strong Diets The turn inward created by the pandemic has introduced many to their kitchens. Processed foods became less available and the stop at the fast food franchise no longer part of the day. So home cooking became a necessity – and then, for some, a new hobby. The trend if firmly toward phytonutrient-rich foods (eat-the-rainbow), fermented vegetables (probiotics), fiber (prebiotics), organically (regeneratively) grown, while eschewing red meat, sugar, saturated fats and too much salt. Helping in this transition to a plant-strong diet is one of my specialties – I am a culinary coach, have a few certificates in plant-based nutrition, am on the team creating a plant-forward option for the CDC’s Diabetes Prevention Program, and will soon be a certified plant-based chef.
Biohacking The newly accepted meaning is the process of making small incremental lifestyle changes, personalized to one’s own body, for improved health and wellness. It’s also been called “citizen or do-it-yourself biology”. This exploding self-care trend usually incorporates tracking devices like FitBits and Apple Watches to raise awareness of pulse, heart, and stress rates along with sleep quality and a dramatic increase in gut health. Some individuals are expanding into testing for genetic predispositions, allergens and other triggers and whole-house health.
Resiliency and Immunity These seem to be the words of the year and an area of focus for health and wellness coaching. Resiliency, in this context, means an ability to recover from or adjust easily to adversity or change; flexibility. Immunity builds protection, invulnerability, resistance and freedom. We are living through a marriage of fear coupled with generations of poor lifestyle habits. Positive Psychology, one of the philosophies underlying H&W coaching, helps build resilience and immunity. Both terms are also frequent goals of biohacking.
Toxicity The switch in our understanding of Covid-19 transmission from surface-borne to air-borne, gave the air purification industry a huge boost. It also further embedded our concern for toxicities of all kinds – putting myriad forms of Detox front and center
There are a number of private insurance companies that have recognized the financial value of health coaches and do cover the services of NBC-HWCs. The AMA (with support from the Veterans Administration and National Board of Health & Wellness coaching) has also recognized this value and, in October 2019, approved new Category III Current Procedural Terminology (CPT®) Codes for NBC-HWCs and CHESs (Certified Health Education Specialists – which I am as well). These temporary codes are intended to support the wide utilization and data collection, with and without reimbursement, required for AMA approval of Category 1 codes. Reimbursement by payers of Category III codes is optional starting January 1, 2020. Payers typically wait until codes have Category I approval to begin reimbursement but current circumstances may alter that perspective.
The Category III Health and Wellness Coaching Codes include:
• 0591T Health and Well-Being Coaching face-to-face; individual, initial assessment
• 0592T individual, follow-up session, at least 30 minutes
• 0593T group (two or more individuals), at least 30 minutes
Medicare also recognizes the benefits of certified health coaches and employs them on staff as does the VA – so one might assume that that agency will support the VA in hastening the implementation of Cat 1 CPT codes.
As of April 1, 2021, NBC-HWC Health & Wellness Coaches now have NPI codes.
The Taxonomy Number for NBC-HWC is 71400000X. My NPI Code is 1164000964. My NBC-HWC certification number is A-3065581.
PROFESSIONAL INSURANCE Jerawyn Integrative Health & Wellness, LLC and Elizabeth Adams-Smith, Ed.D., CHES, NBC-HWC carry liability insurance with Alternative Balance Professional Group / Citadel Insurance Services, LC underwritten by Lloyds, London. Master Policy Number – AB-1006, Certificate number AC125313. Aggregate Limit $3,000,000.
*Recognizing that, for many patients, working with a health coach is still, for the short-term, fee-for-service, I offer Health & Wellness Coaching on a very flexible sliding scale – especially for those patients on Medicaid.