Health coaching can make a big difference in diabetes management. A Health Advisor is even better. Learn what the difference is here.
Many people living with diabetes develop mental health barriers that keep them from meeting life’s demands. While there are standard medical protocols to diagnose and treat diabetes, working with a health coach to help manage diabetes is not as common.
Health coaches are often seen as wellness experts on behavior change, health, and motivation. Here's what research has to say about the value of health coaching and its impact on diabetes.
What is Health Coaching?
Health coaching is a practice that examines wellness as a whole by evaluating lifestyle and dietary factors. Health coaches often act as cheerleaders who provide the knowledge, skills, and tools needed to take charge of self-care and well-being. Chronic health conditions — particularly heart disease and diabetes — are primarily driven by behavior and lifestyle patterns. Health coaching can help people with type 2 diabetes discover ways to manage blood sugar better.
Some studies have pointed out that health coaching can help patients improve their HbA1c by about 0.3–0.6% within 4–6 months. Additionally, more than 79% of coaching participants stated their coach helped them better manage their diabetes, and more than half expressed interest in receiving further coaching.
Diabetes is a condition that has been shown to benefit from health coaching, positively influencing the individual's perceptions of food, eating habits, and physical activity. Health coaching can improve quality of life and reduce other health risks. While they can help improve overall health, health coaches must be qualified and help people feel at ease.
Health Coach vs. Health Advisor
A standard health coach isn’t always enough. Anyone can claim to be a health coach. Diathrive Health believes that, in order to make a real impact on people living with diabetes, advising is crucial.
A health coach helps someone find their own answers to their own health concerns. This is not a bad thing! Some people already know what they need to do for better health, and a health coach can guide them toward that.
Working with a Health Advisor is like leveling up. Diathrive Health Advisors provide real clinical knowledge and support. They are qualified and certified to listen, assess, educate, and create individualized care plans.
3 Ways Health Coaches Can Support People with Diabetes
Connect and Support Beyond Diagnosis
One of the primary roles of a health coach is to identify and utilize effective communication to support clients in between their doctor's appointments.
Studies have found that people with diabetes who used health promotion apps with a virtual health coach integration had enhanced benefits for diabetes management than those people who just used the app. In other words, personalized digital communication made a difference in glycemic control.
Path to Self-Efficacy and Wellness
Health coaching is effective in helping people who live with diabetes develop a greater sense of self-efficacy through developing goal-setting and problem-solving skills while managing cognitive and emotional barriers.
Emphasize Small Changes to Power Daily Diabetes Management
For people living with diabetes, health coaches can provide further support for medication and diabetes management. A health coach can help:
- Improve medication adherence, A1c tracking, provider follow-up, and glucose testing data review.
- Keep an individual on track with diet plans and making good food choices.
- Develop tools and strategies to identify blocks and patterns to lead to behavior change.
Health Advisor: Individualizing Diabetes Care
With Diathrive Health Advisors, individualized care is back.
Our Health Advisors work with people to help them understand the basics of diabetes pathology, treatment, and management standards of care. In addition, they can assess and identify the individual’s level of diabetes distress and create customized, sustainable plans to achieve better health outcomes.
Health Advisors can apply a physician's recommendations to help understand how and why these protocols are essential for managing diabetes and collaboratively find ways to work the protocols into their lifestyle.
Diathrive Health is committed to prioritizing people and the way they want to interact. Our platform gives people unlimited access to tools needed for managing blood sugar and clinical support just about anytime they need it.
We believe that basic health coaching isn't enough. That's why we created our Health Advisor program. Our clinically-trained Health Advisors are real people and true diabetes experts, holding credentials like RN, NP, CDCES, and RD. Using psychosocial and behavioral assessment criteria designed by the Behavioral Diabetes Institute, our Health Advisors support people at various stages of their personal health journey, including connecting and providing follow-up, helping them find ways to stay on top of their medication and monitoring protocol, diabetes education at all stages, and guiding them toward feeling empowered.
Learn More About Diathrive Health.
