How CRMA™ Helps Determine Future Care Needs in Spinal Injuries

Introduction

Maintenance Care vs. Supportive Care

In the world of healthcare, it’s important to distinguish between maintenance care and supportive care:

• Maintenance Care
  
  • Delivered to individuals who do not currently have a condition or symptom.
  • The goal is to maintain overall health and prevent future problems.
• Supportive Care
  
  • Necessary when a patient does have a condition (e.g., a diabetic needing insulin to control blood sugar).
  • In the case of musculoskeletal conditions, supportive care is therapeutically necessary to help a patient maintain the gains achieved through rehabilitation.

Spinal Ligament Injury: The Most Significant Spinal Injury

The spine is composed of bone and connective tissue. Within the connective tissue category, there are two major imaging biomarkers for injury:

• Excessive Motion for non-disc ligament damage (identified through tools like CRMA™).
• Disc Herniations (identified on MRI).+
  
  

How CRMA™ Reveals Spinal Instability

CRMA™ is designed to show:

• How severely the non-disc ligaments are damaged.
• The degree of spinal instability present.
• Whether a patient meets a surgical threshold (often referred to as a “surgical level” of instability) but can avoid surgery through ongoing supportive care.

This objective information, combined with clinical findings and the patient’s overall health status, helps practitioners determine if a patient will need future supportive care. Some key variables include:

• Clinical Correlation: Does the patient’s exam match the imaging findings?
• Patient Condition: Is the patient otherwise healthy or dealing with comorbidities (e.g., diabetes, obesity, malnutrition)?
• Extent of Instability: Do the imaging findings suggest progression toward potential surgery, even if it’s being managed non-surgically now?
  
  

Future Care Needs and Justification

By clearly identifying and measuring ligament damage, CRMA™ helps providers:

• Demonstrate Need for Supportive Care: Showing how instability can worsen over time helps justify ongoing therapy.
•  Document Objective Findings: Insurers and reviewers require evidence-based rationale for treatment. CRMA™ provides quantifiable data on spinal instability.
• Align with Consensus and Guidelines: The medical consensus acknowledges that spinal instability accelerates degeneration, and patients with confirmed instability may require long-term supportive care.

When imaging results from CRMA™ are consistent with clinical evaluations, it becomes much easier for both insurers and peer reviewers to see why future care might be necessary.

Key Takeaways

• Maintenance Care is for preventing issues in otherwise healthy individuals.
  
• Supportive Care is therapeutically necessary for patients who have a persistent or chronic condition, such as spinal instability.
  
• Spinal Ligament Injury is a major contributor to chronic spinal problems, potentially leading to future care needs.
  
• CRMA™ identifies the severity of ligament damage, providing objective data that supports treatment plans and the need for ongoing care.
  

Conclusion

Effective management of spinal injuries goes beyond immediate symptom relief—it involves planning for the patient’s long-term well-being. CRMA™ equips healthcare providers with the tools they need to measure and document the extent of ligament damage and spinal instability, ensuring patients receive the supportive care they require.

If you have further questions about CRMA™, how it works, or how it can be integrated into your practice, feel free to reach out to us at Spinal Kinetics. We’re here to help you deliver the best possible outcomes for your patients.