LeadingAge Senior Vice President Cheryl Phillips, M.D. (right)

Skilled nursing facilities are expected to have missed their overall goal of reducing off-label use of antipsychotics by 15% for 2012, but they should continue to push for reductions, provider leaders said.

Facilities have averaged around a 4% reduction, said Alice Bonner, Ph.D., R.N., at the LeadingAge PEAK conference in March. At the time, Bonner was the director of the division of nursing homes of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

CMS and the American Health Care Association had aimed for facilities to achieve a 15% reduction by the end of 2012.  Fourth-quarter results are still being evaluated.

LeadingAge Senior Vice President for Advocacy Cheryl Phillips, M.D., noted that some facilities have individually achieved up to a 50% reduction rate in the use of antipsychotics.

The 15% goal was always ambitious, and there is progress, said AHCA spokesman Greg Crist.

“We are tracking in a positive direction,” he said.

More than half of AHCA providers have decreased some off-label use of antipsychotics, according to a progress report released in April. Thirty percent of members met the 15% reduction goal for off-label antipsychotic use by the third quarter of 2012, the report noted.