First Coast LCD

The concept of 360 degree advocacy is to get national organizations, national content experts, state level leadership, and state level advocates together on a coordinated team for high impact, advocacy.

First Coast is the Medicare Advisory Carrier serving FL, Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico.  First Coast drafted a new neuropsychology LCD that was unfavorable to patient access and the practice climate.  In response, the IOPC created a 360 Degree Advocacy Team  which included:

• Florida State Psychology Association president and executive director
• National advocacy experts who had intervened in other regional Medicare Carriers LCD process.
• Florida neuropsychologists 

The team rapidly put together a proposed set of language revisions, and send out a joint letter signed by the presidents of all the major national neuropsychology organizationss.  The team also produced a letter from the Florida Psych Association, and coordinated a grassroots letter campaign that produced over 70 individual letters.  

First Coast has published their response to LCD comments, and began the document by acknowledging the IOPC comments and large grassroots response and accepted almost all of the many IOPC suggestions in the new LCD.