In today’s video, we address legal limits of health coaching in a risk analysis.

Hi, I’m Michael H. Cohen, founding attorney of Cohen Healthcare Law Group. We help healthcare industry clients just like you, navigate healthcare and FDA legal issues so you can launch, or grow and scale your healthcare business.

Today’s scenario is your online software or app that provides some kind of health coaching.  Let’s call it weight loss, sleep therapy, healing from grief, spiritual practice, better nutrition, relationships, financial abundance, whatever it is. The founders started out coaching people and their business skyrocketed so they decided to train some more people and create a national brand.

If you’ve perused this healthcare and FDA law blog or you’ve been our client, this model is very familiar.  There’s a basic allowance for disseminating online education and information.  If it’s just a course, that’s likely fine.  Once you get into one-on-one coaching and counseling, you then have to assess whether you potentially have a service that can only be offered by certain licensed professionals, like in medicine or psychology, or if this is something anyone can do. Can Joe the plumber, do it?

Most coaching services are fairly aggressive in pushing the limits of non-licensed practice, and so conceivably could be looked at as medicine or psychology or maybe nutrition – depending on the statute and they’re usually pretty broad; yet, it’s such a viable, modern business model that most regulators don’t enforce prohibitions against unlicensed and corporate practice or psychology unless the violation is egregious and/or someone gets injured.

If it’s meant to be coaching, try to stay away from diagnostic labels.  Focus on habits, motivation, goals and progress—not on clinical markers. Have a robust online disclaimer, perhaps in the terms of use.  You can hire coaches and generally this won’t raise kickback or fee-splitting issues. Generally, depends on the state and what you do.

If it is clinical practice, get malpractice insurance, and get a read on kickback and fee-splitting issues, as well as corporate practice issues.

Thanks for watching. We’ve got a ton of resource for you on our blog. Feel free to contact us, we have helped so many healthcare industry clients build their dream.  We look forward to working with you on your journey to success!