At the M Health Fairview clinic specializing in the treatment of adults with ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder), psychiatrist Lidia Zylowska, MD, oversees the care of countless patients who come in with complaints ranging from poor focus to feeling overwhelmed and stressed. Zylowska, an associate professor in the University of Minnesota Medical School’s Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences, started the clinic in 2018 to address what she calls “a whole-person, whole-health, and whole-life condition.” The clinic was designed to train UMN psychiatry residents to recognize and treat adult ADHD.

“ADHD can affect many aspects of a person’s life,” explains Zylowska. “Adults with ADHD often struggle with ‘adulting’—that is, planning, prioritizing,  and managing everyday tasks. But beyond their challenges with executive functioning,” she adds, “adults with ADHD also suffer at higher rates with both psychiatric and physical conditions. For example, anxiety, depression, substance abuse, sleep issues, and post-partum depression are more common, as well as migraine, asthma, chronic pain, and obesity. Additionally, we often see difficulties maintaining healthy lifestyle habits, which makes it hard  to treat ADHD.”

While once thought to only affect children, ADHD is now known to affect about 6% of the U.S. adult population. Typical treatment primarily consists of medication and, often, a recommendation for talk-therapy. But Zylowska, along with colleague Cherie O’Neill, EdD, FACSM, NBC-HWC, director of the Earl E. Bakken Center for Spirituality & Healing’s Integrative Health & Wellbeing Coaching Programs, aims to change that treatment formula with an innovative new training model that pairs psychiatric residents with health coaches who can support healthy habits.

Forging New Paths

The Bakken Center is no stranger to pioneering new programs. The Center launched the first-ever graduate-level certificate program for health coaching in the United States in 2005 and has since grown it into the country’s preeminent Master of Arts in Integrative Health & Wellbeing Coaching degree program.

“Our program stands out because of its history of assuming a leadership role,” believes O’Neill. “With this Weil grant, we’ll be creating a training model that, for the first time, integrates health coaches into the healthcare team that treats adults with ADHD. But once that model is refined, we believe many other individuals with chronic conditions will benefit from a whole-person behavior-change approach with a health coach on the team.”

In recent years, health coaching has gained significant recognition as a highly effective tool for helping patients address complex medical conditions through behavior and lifestyle changes. According to O’Neill, health coaches empower their clients to discover solutions.

“But right now,” O’Neill says, “health coaches—despite all that is known about their effectiveness—are not really integrated into the healthcare system. There’s no insurance reimbursement for their services, and patients have to shoulder the responsibility for seeking out and working with a health coach on their own.”

Zylowska agrees. “Currently, doctors don’t typically interact with health coaches. And health coaches don’t normally receive specific education on ADHD. We believe the two specialties can learn from one another.”

A New Training Approach

In the new training program O’Neill and Zylowska are creating, third- and fourth-year psychiatry residents will be paired with a student health coach. The goal is straightforward: residents will learn more about coaching, and coaches will learn more about ADHD with the ultimate goal of improving patient care.

The plan is that by early 2026, health coaching students will be in the clinic, collaborating with the psychiatry residents as they treat adult patients with ADHD. Coaches will also attend weekly care meetings that include not just doctors, but social workers, psychologists, and other support professionals—a truly integrated approach to ADHD treatment.

“The integrative health and wellbeing perspective is all too often forgotten in the treatment of mental illness, so we can really benefit from bringing in a new profession like integrative health and wellbeing coaching,” says Zylowska. “It’s a fundamental shift in approach—proactive, rather than reactive.”

The O’Neill and Zylowska-led program is also a first in an academic setting in the U.S. By standardizing the collaboration between psychiatrist and coach in a clinical setting, the two are creating what they hope will be viewed as the new gold standard for ADHD care.

“Our goals are to increase our understanding of interprofessional care that includes health coaching and improve the process for everyone involved,” says O’Neill. “Psychiatry residents learn how to work with coaches, coaches learn about neurodiversity, and working directly with doctors, we learn how best to develop a scalable educational framework that can expand this idea to other specialties. Most importantly, patient outcomes see significant improvements.”

Philanthropy Edge

While philanthropy has been key to the development of many new, innovative programs, this Weil grant comes at a critical moment for the health coaching profession.

“The Weil Foundation is really interested in cutting-edge ideas,” says Mary Jo Kreitzer, PhD, RN, FAAN, FNAP, founder and director of the Earl E. Bakken Center for Spirituality & Healing, “so we are appreciative that the Foundation recognized the truly innovative approach that Lidia and Cherie’s training program takes. Philanthropy has always been critical to allowing us to build new programs—especially programs that improve access to healthcare, spirituality, and integrative practices.”

Even though health coaching has emerged as one of the most promising modalities in integrative medicine, its full potential, says O’Neill, has yet to be tapped. Breaking practitioners out of their psychiatry and coaching silos to form an in-clinic alliance providing more comprehensive care for adults with ADHD may enable O’Neill and Zylowska to generate data that helps persuade insurance companies to finally welcome health coaches fully into the healthcare fold.

“This program has the potential to redefine the continuum of care for adults with ADHD,” believes O’Neill. “And if programs like ours generate the positive results for patients that we hope to see and insurance companies begin reimbursing for health coaching services, the impact on the coaching profession, patient outcomes, and integrative medicine will be enormous.”