Are there too many sick care coaches?

The sick care game has several new coaches on the sidelines-physician coaches, executive coaches, entrepreneur coaches, patient coaches and population health coaches. I'm not sure how you coach a population, but given the imagination of the folks at Google, my guess is that sometime soon you can create a Go to Meeting or Hang Out with every person on Facebook, and that's a lot of people.?

Atul Gawande thinks you should have a coach.

?Of all forms of communication, feedback is perhaps the hardest to give and receive. The giver has to criticize, which might hurt someone’s feelings, so they avoid having the conversation in the first place. And if the conversation does occur, the recipient is likely to feel shame, hearing some version of “you’re not good enough and you need to change.” So if feedback doesn’t help people up their game, then what does? These authors offer four steps to shift from a culture of feedback to a culture of coaching.

Like everything, there is a right way and wrong way to coach?and the discipline has its own lingo. Do you know what?praxis?means? In medical education, we call it see one, do one, teach one.?

What is a life coach? Here are some answers. Be sure you don't confuse them with health coaches.

Athletic coaches get paid big bucks since there is a lot of money and prestige on the line. The recent dust up at the University of Missouri was influenced by the fact that the football team earns the university a million dollars a week during the season.?

Suppose we were to treat doctors and patient coaches the same way we treat Bill Belichick?

1. They would be paid $7.5-8M dollars a season

2. They would get fired if the doctors and patients they coach don't have a winning season

3. They would be hired by another BIG INSURANCE or BIG PROVIDER organization within a week of being fired

4. They would wear hoodies and hats with the logos of their employers

5. They would walk around with the playbook in their cell phones and hide their mouths when calling signals so the competition wouldn't know which play was called.

6. They would know more about data, intelligence and Moneyball than any doctor or patient ever did.

7. They would practice state of the art performance enhancement because of their intimate knowledge of pharmacoenhancement, genomics and?drug taking compliance.

8. They would divide the playbook into offense, defense, and special teams. Getting patients to play offense with their health is almost impossible, so that would be easy to teach and could be installed into a smart watch on the coach's wrist to send in the signals. Playing defense is a lot more complicated since most of sick care spending is attributable to a small group who were walk-ons but stayed on the team because the waiver deadline passed. And then there are the special teams coaches who get to play the most dangerous part of the game, working with non-compliant patients with multiple chronic, complex illnesses who didn't work out in the off season and are not mentally or physically prepared to play a full 60 minutes, let alone win in overtime. The special teams playbook comes down to basic blocking and tackling, since there are only 6 risk factors that are the most risky.?For crying out loud, how hard can it be to get patients to eat right, exercise, quit smoking, stop drinking so much alcohol, get up every now and then using sit to stand desks and getting enough shut eye?

9. When things go wrong, coaches can always blame the players for failing to execute an immaculately designed game plan.

10. Winning coaches always have the owners to back them up, particularly when the franchise is making billions.?

Do you have what it takes?

Here are more tips on how to make patient coaching work.

Patient navigators are helping patients make better doctors and their clients make better decisions about care options.?Patients learn to reflect critically on medical decisions using a process called?SCOPED?(situation, choices, objectives, people, evaluation, and decisions).

Let's talk after the playoffs, in plain English, for a quick coaching session and to review your contract.

Arlen Meyers, MD, MBA is the President and CEO of the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs on Substack and Editor of Digital Health Entrepreneurship