Employee wellness coaching as an interpersonal communication intervention: exploring intervention effects on healthcare costs, risks, and behaviors

Fedesco, Heather Noel. Ph.D., Purdue University, May 2015. Employee Wellness Coaching as an Interpersonal Communication Intervention: Exploring Intervention Effects on Healthcare Costs, Risks, and Behaviors. Major Professors: Melanie Morgan and William B. Collins. In order to address the rise in healthcare expenditures, employers are turning to wellness programs as a means to potentially curtail costs. One newly implemented program is wellness coaching, which takes a communicative and holistic approach to helping others make improvements to their health. Wellness coaching is a behavioral health intervention whereby coaches work with clients to help them attain wellness-promoting goals in order to change lifestyle-related behaviors across a range of areas. Given the limited amount of research on wellness coaching, this project had four main purposes in order to fill gaps in the literature: to (1) identify whether wellness coaching interventions have an impact on client healthcare outcomes, (2) apply confirmation theory to this context in order to provide an explanatory framework to better understand the communication mechanisms that underlie this intervention, (3) identify the various topics that are discussed during wellness coaching sessions, and (4) test the extent to which a wellness coaching intervention should be targeted to specific clients. To examine these questions, a large employee wellness coaching program was evaluated, which serviced a population of over 14,000 employer insured individuals from several local employers of which almost 500