International Congress on Integrative Medicine & Health
This week I'm in Salt Lake City with colleagues from the University of Utah, University of Vermont, and the Institute for Behavior Change to present at the 2026 International Congress on Integrative Medicine & Health — one of the most important gatherings in our field.
Our session is called Elevating Health & Wellness Coaching in Clinical Settings: The Next Chapter Grounded in Science, Rigor, and Sustainable Change. The title says what we mean. For more than a decade, health coaching has been called an "emerging field." We believe it has emerged. And now the work is to elevate it — to build the scientific foundation, definitional clarity, and practice infrastructure that will let it take its rightful place in clinical care.
The session brings together a collaborative research team that has been quietly doing serious work over the past year. Kate O'Farrell from the University of Utah, Susan Whitman from the University of Vermont, and Jennifer Lundman and Rebecca Weinand from the Institute for Behavior Change have each contributed to a body of work I'm glad to be part of. The three of us from academic health centers bring our perspective on research and integration, while Jennifer and Rebecca bring the practitioner and organizational depth that keeps this work grounded.
We're presenting findings from two ongoing research projects. One is a scoping literature review of clinical health and well-being coaching across disciplines — a project that has now screened nearly 5,000 articles and is starting to reveal both the field's real strengths and its significant gaps. The evidence base is larger and more methodologically substantial than most people realize. There are nearly 2,000 randomized controlled trials in the corpus alone. At the same time, the definitional inconsistency is striking: a majority of articles don't define what coaching actually means in their study, don't identify who is doing the coaching, and don't specify any theoretical framework for why it should work. When a field is studying itself without shared definitions, synthesis becomes almost impossible — and that is exactly the problem we're trying to address.
The second project is a Delphi study on integrating health and wellness coaches into primary care teams. The Delphi method is a structured, multi-round consensus process used to build agreement among diverse experts when clear standards don't yet exist — which is precisely where we are with clinical health coaching. Early rounds have already surfaced strong agreement on what matters most: role clarity, defined scope of practice, collaborative workflows, and supervision. What's equally interesting is where agreement on importance is high but feasibility is lower — those gaps point directly to the implementation work that still needs to happen.
These aren't abstract research questions. They connect to something I see in my own work at Anthropedia and the University of Missouri: coaches who are well-trained and genuinely skilled, but embedded in systems that haven't figured out how to use them well. The problem is usually not the coaching — it's the absence of shared language, clear role definitions, and workflows that help care teams actually integrate what coaches bring.
Our session closes with a look at what comes next — a research agenda, shared principles for behavior change science, and opportunities to collaborate. The Institute for Behavior Change is also hosting a Catalyst Convening: Coaching and Clinical Integration Summit this summer in Columbia, Missouri, July 31 through August 2, designed to bring this conversation to a broader group of practitioners, educators, and researchers who want to help shape the field's future.
It's a good time to be doing this work. The field is at a real inflection point — large enough to matter, developed enough to build on, and still open enough to get right. I'm grateful to be at the table with people who care about getting it right.
If you're at the Congress and want to connect, come find us Tuesday morning in the Aspen room, 11:15 AM. And if you're interested in the Catalyst Convening or the research we're doing, reach out at info@instituteforbehaviorchange.org.
