How to Implement Acupuncture in your Long Term Care Facility
Acupuncture in LTC or SNF
Skilled Acupuncture Services offers a new approach to treating elderly patients with chronic low back pain where they live (Long Term Care Facilities) or temporarily reside in the course of their rehabilitation (Skilled Nursing Facilities).
Who is Eligibile?
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid or CMS will now cover up 20 visits per patient for chronic low back pain (cLBP).
Chronic LBP is defined by CMS as:
- Lasting 12 weeks or longer; nonspecific, in that it has no identifiable systemic cause (i.e., not associated with metastatic, inflammatory, infectious, etc. disease)
- not associated with surgery
- not associated with pregnancy.
- Those patients showing some improvement and no harm after an initial 12 visits can receive an additional 8 sessions if prescribed by the patient PCP. No more than 20 acupuncture treatments are covered annually.
- Treatment must be discontinued if the patient is not improving or is regressing.
How to implement Acupuncture at your facility?
At Skilled Acupuncture Services our goal is to seamlessly integrate acupuncture into the community activities of your elder population. This requires several steps including
- Identifying those patients who are eligible to receive acupuncture under CMS criteria
- Obtaining informed consent to receive acupuncture by patient or Responsible Party
- Involving the Primary Care Provider (MD, DO, NP, or PA) to prescribe acupuncture.
Who will pay for the acupuncture services?
- Skilled Acupuncture Services aims to provide the highest quality care to elderly patients without burdening the patient or the facility financially. Given that CMS has finally decided to cover acupuncture for chronic low back pain, we now have an opportunity to do so.
- Our goal is to maximize patient care within the constraints and benefits of CMS. We hope CMS will continue to recognize acupuncture as an essential part of elderly care and widen the covered benefits. Until then, we will continue to bill CMS directly for all acupuncture services up and to the 20 potential visits annually at no cost to patient or the facility.