Hi, I’m Michael H. Cohen. I’m founding attorney at Cohen Healthcare Law Group. We provide legal strategies and solutions to businesses that accelerate health and wellness.

Health coaches and health coaching businesses, what do you need to know from a legal perspective? Obviously lots of health coaches out there, health coaches, health coaching, multi-state businesses, everybody loves a coach, right?

But what are the legal risks and what do you need to think about?

So first of all, define your scope of practice.

We worked recently with a health coach who was developing disclaimers, and there’s some standard disclaimers. This doesn’t replace medical services, warranties, but you want this stuff in there to protect yourself.

Informed consent. The consent form has to be detailed, not just this generic, boilerplate thing. There are things that we know to put in, want to talk about the treatment, the risk, the alternatives, very specifically to mitigate the risk that someone could say failed informed consent.

Third, licensing, huge area. You know, some states talk about coaching. Some states talk about medicine, psychology. They vary how much they say, what level of detail, what’s prescribed, what’s allowed. Sometimes nothing said at all. You need a lot of interpretation, and the rules are a patchwork across states.

So it’s important to find a healthcare attorney that’s very experienced working with the healthcare coaching industry to give legal advice for the coaching business or practice.

If you’d like to dive deeper into any of the topics we’ve talked about today, reach out to us. Click below. We’d love to talk to you. We look forward to it.