Anyone doing TMS with good income?

[DD214_DOC]

My clinic has a neurostar machine and I am training to do TMS. I spoke quite a bit with the rep doing the training. For those using TMS or know someone who is, have they found it to be cost effective as a supplementation to income? The rep told me that medicare/d reimburses at $184 per treatment but the Senstar alone costs $100 per treatment, plus the cost of the tech/staff to run the treatment, plus the cost to lease or buy the machine. It looks to me that the profit margin is pretty low and possibly even negative considering it takes 40 minutes per treatment after the initial MT stuff is set.

There are no studies comparing TMS to an antidepressant with augmentation, and we know that med check appointments reimburse well as far as per-hour revenue.

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[F0nzie]

I was told insurance companies did not reimburse TMS treatments

 

[OldPsychDoc]

I will refer you back to July's thread.

 

[DD214_DOC]

Interesting. The rep did say that several insurance companies now reimburse for TMS including medicare/d. I spent most of the 4 hours of training heckling her over the cost and how poorly cost-effective it is for practice, especially since it has never been empiraclly compared to augmentation therapy.

It's apparently FDA indicated for use after a patient has failed only a single treatment, but some private insurers are requiring patients to have failed 4-5 treatment attempts. If I have a patient who has failed 5 different medication attempts, I'm not going to go on to TMS -- I'm going to use something that I know works like ECT, which was shown to still be more effective than TMS.

By the way, TMS hurts -- a lot.

 

[kumar28]

did you ask her how much private insurers reimburse? Also for those pts that are willing to pay cash what do they normally charge. How many treatments are recommended for a 'full treatment'...

Thanks in advance

 

[DD214_DOC]

did you ask her how much private insurers reimburse? Also for those pts that are willing to pay cash what do they normally charge. How many treatments are recommended for a 'full treatment'...

Thanks in advance

Some private insurers are reimbursing $300-$400. However, some of these have higher restrictions such as failed 3-4 previous treatments.

I didn't ask about cash payments.

20-30 treatment sessions for a "full course".

 

[DD214_DOC]

So she said some clinicians are bypassing insurance and doing cash for an entire treatment course, ranging from $8000 - $12000 per patient for a full course.

 

[toothless rufus]

I heard that there's a medicare/medicaid version that is a hat made out of kitchen magnets. It probably doesn't work. 😡

 

[OldPsychDoc]

I heard that there's a medicare/medicaid version that is a hat made out of kitchen magnets. It probably doesn't work. 😡

Probably works just as well as the "real thing".