Is there an entrepreneurial opportunity for physicians with renewed focus on wellness?

Yesterday's Yahoo News article on wellness care heralds an important move afoot to focus on wellness as one of the next strategies for tackling our country's significant healthcare problems.

Think 3 Ps: Good health care is preventive, predictive and personalized, a rarity today in a crisis-oriented care system far better at treating disease than keeping it at bay. To help change that, one of the nation's top medical groups starts a major push this week for what patients might call whole-body wellness care.

"Health is more than the absence of disease," says Dr. Ralph Snyderman, who heads a three-day meeting of the prestigious Institute of Medicine to get onto Congress' radar this health-promotion approach, what jargon-loving doctors call "integrative medicine."

I remember how frustrated I felt as a family doctor when, in a 15 minute visit, I had to try and provide persuasive guidance to my overweight, hypercholesterolemic, and hypertensive about making lifestyle changes. I could feel my spirits plummet as I started the conversation, knowing how little impact my sound bites would have.

I know this defeated feeling contributed to my leaving practice.

I also think it's a big reason why I was to drawn to the power of a good coaching relationship where we have the luxury of time over many months to bring about lasting change. While I am not a health coach, I have been a big proponent of bringing the coaching model into medicine.

If you're still in practice, or contemplating an alternative healthcare-related career, what opportunity could this shift in emphasis mean for you, assuming there is funding for it?

Could it be:

• providing health promotion classes or teleclasses for small groups of your patients?
• creating and selling lower-cost educational products (DVDs, Cds, work books)?
• hiring a health coach to help your patients?
• becoming a health coach yourself?
• aligning with other practitioners such as registered dietitians, massage therapists, yoga teachers, stress reduction counselors etc to provide a more comprehensive wellness approach?

How confident do you feel that "they" will finally get that wellness really matters?