Empowered Patient Podcast Health Coaches Addressing Stress and Substance Abuse Using Power of Digital Tools with Clark Lagemann Avidon Health
Clark Lagemann is the CEO of Avidon Health, developing technologies for healthcare providers and payers in order to deliver personalized health improvement plans for employees. Health coaches deploy digital tools to address the challenges of substance abuse and stress in order to find the root causes of problems and find paths to behavior change.
Clark explains, "Well, the first thing is you need to create a culture in which your employees feel comfortable sharing and speaking about the challenges they're facing. Absenteeism, everyone knows when Billy's not at work, but presenteeism is much more difficult to identify. There are so many employees right now that are back at the office that aren't able to effectively deliver objectives and outcomes for the organization."
"Everything connects into the overall person. If you look at some of the data, the chronic healthcare conditions that we see today, it's a problem. But if you look at the root cause, it's stress. It's bad sleep, poor nutrition, and lack of physical activity. Those typical root causes are at the origin of all chronic healthcare costs and diseases. So we're talking about $3.8 trillion worth of annual healthcare costs that are contributed by these factors. Obviously, we need something different, unique and special to engage those employees to treat those types of conditions and those root causes."
"Wellness coaching, I consider the tip of the spear in the healthcare spectrum. There is a shortage of primary care providers, and there is a lack of available appointments currently. People don't want to go into an office. There are all these different challenges. The idea of health coaches and wellness coaches, it's about creating behavior change and being that first step that enables people to be engaged and to understand the risks and factors that are contributing to their healthcare. It also creates the right behaviors that allow them to see long-term health improvements."
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