Integrative medicine includes the best of conventional medicine but redefines health to include the person's body, mind, spirituality and community with a special focus on the patient-practitioner bond. Borrowing from integrative medicine, Health Coaching for Behavior Change: Motivational Interviewing Methods and Practice presents motivational interviewing skills and how they can be used to invite and elicit behavior change and impact health coaching outcomes.

In this 35-page report, a physician and a health psychologist from the field of integrative medicine affirm how training in motivational interviewing, self-management and even spirituality and healing can enrich the health coaching encounter.

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This week's experts are Sean Slovenski, president and CEO of Hummingbird Coaching Services; and John Harris, senior vice president and chief wellness officer of Healthways.

Question: How do age and geographical differences impact the use of technology in health coaching?

Response: (Sean Slovenski) Typically, clients over 50 years old prefer phone interactions with their coach for the initial conversations. They tend to move online for subsequent interactions.

One coaching statistic that holds true for all programs, including health, parent or life coaching, is that approximately 30 to 40 percent of the population will opt for their first coaching session to be by phone. The rest will opt for communicating through e-mail, journal entries or an instant message feature. After that first 30 percent gets through their first phone call, about 92 to 94 percent end up working online exclusively, unless they dont have access to the Internet. That 30 percent tends to include the over 50 age group that needs to find a comfort zone, since they didnt grow up with the same technology as younger clients. Theyre not sure how an online relationship will work, so they get that connection to their coaches and then move on to an online situation. Mostly women follow that pattern. I have no science to back that up other than the trend that men dont necessarily care about the social nature of the relationship as much as women do. Women find it important to talk to the person theyll be working with first, in order to feel a sense of connection.

(John Harris) The way in which people change is generational. Our algorithms look at age as a factor. We provide clients with options, including phone, Web, in-person and even mail. Therefore, whether its driven by generational factors or just their preferences, youve got them covered. There are a couple of factors regarding geographical differences. Weve created the highest correlations with rural versus urban. Theres a significant difference in the profile and available resources for people who live in rural versus urban environments. We find that rural people have fewer resources available. They have the mentality that you do for yourself and dont rely on others. Thats a big factor that we address. There are also differences in behaviors across the country. For example, southern cooking truly does exist. The further south you go, theres a tendency to eat differently than someone who lives in San Francisco, for example. However, we have not been able to create significantly high correlations or make sweeping changes to how we would approach people based on geography, with the exception of the rural versus urban factor.

For more information on health coaching and IT use, please visit: http://store.hin.com/product.asp?itemid=3913