The Global Landscape: Organization and Association News

Partnership With NCCAoM on Credentialing Integrative Health Practitioners—New open Access Resource Under Development Recently, the Academic Consortium for Complementary and Alternative Health Care (ACCAHC) received a request for information from a concerned hospital administrator. The institution’s medical doctor–sponsor of a licensed acupuncturist was taking a job elsewhere. No other medical acupuncturist was on staff. How could the outpatient/inpatient program for offering services of a licensed acupuncturist continue? Did ACCAHC’s Center for Optimal Integration have information on other credentialing processes and practices? ACCAHC’s center team quickly realized that its goal of building resources for optimal integration of acupuncturists and other integrative health and medicine practitioners was missing an important component if credentialing and privileging information was not available. Administrators had the same questions regarding massage therapists, doctors of chiropractic and naturopathic medicine, and others. An ACCAHC member organization, the National Certification Commission for Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine (NCCAOM), had initiated a parallel project. The NCCAOM initiative was to support licensed acupuncturists and particularly NCCAOM-certified practitioners at the diplomate level. NCCAOM’s chief executive officer, Kory Ward-Cook, PhD, MT (ASCP), CAE, explained NCCAOM’s decision to partner with ACCAHC through a grant and a collaborative team: “We are seeing rapidly growing interest of hospitals and other medical facilities in bringing the services of our diplomates to their patients. At the same time, we know that many administrators are still mystified about how to bring them in.” Ward-Cook and her staff built an expert task force of acupuncturists credentialed into facilities such as Lutheran Medical Center (New York), Mayo Clinic (Minnesota), Cedar Hills Hospital (Oregon), and the US military facilities. For the NCCAOM-ACCAHC partnership, this experienced team enhanced insights gleaned by ACCAHC’s staff member Jennifer Olejownik, PhD, from 2 dozen additional professionals identified and interviewed. Many are associated with the other professions, and each helped identify internal or external documents to share on the center site. This ACCAHC resource is currently under construction at the center’s site (www.optimalintegration.org). The goal of the project is to put useful tools in the hands of administrators and practitioners so that services of acupuncturists and other integrative practitioners can be more readily available to provide optimal patient care. Let us know if you have additional resources to contribute.