Advancing Integrated Care through Practice Coaching

Introduction: Practice coaches are skilled consultants who work in health care service delivery systems to make changes designed to improve patient outcomes, yet research is limited regarding their use to support integrated health care. This article describes the use of practice coaches in a large-scale effort to implement integrated care in the United States for patients with complex care needs.

Theory and methods: This immersive, qualitative project involved five implementation team members; eight practice coaches; and 77 staff members from 12 health care organizations. Semistructured interviews were recorded and transcribed verbatim. Thematic and content analyses were applied in multiple stages to understand the use of practice coaches.

Results: Qualitative themes about the use of practice coaching in this initiative were: (a) development of “a very rich coaching model”; (b) moving from an organic to standardized coaching approach; and (c) coaches representing the “face of the initiative.”

Discussion: A rich coaching model that includes an interdisciplinary coaching team can support integrated care transformation but challenges including finding highly qualified coaches and sustaining and disseminating the coaching model exist. Standardization was seen as a way to address such challenges.

Conclusion: Practice coaches can provide individualized, hands-on guidance to support successful implementation of integrated care.