
In 1966, the AMA published the first edition of CPT, which at that time focused on surgical procedures. CPT HistoryĬPT is owned and maintained by American Medical Association, which has copyright protection on CPT. In fact, a recent on-line survey summarized considerable misconceptions about CPT. Despite its near-ubiquity for reporting physician work, misconceptions about CPT are common. Increasingly, CPT coding captures quality and outcome measures - a feature that is likely to have increasing importance in the era of Pay for Performance (P4P) and the Physician Quality Reporting Initiative. If you are interested, keep reading! We will break down some of the most common questions around CPT codes to help you understand how they work.Every day, physicians rely upon Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) to report their services for payment by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and other third-party payers. Increased accuracy, efficiency and understanding-this is the hope of CPT and other medical coding systems. This could lead to you having a higher chance of getting an accurate insurance report, your future healthcare providers having a higher chance of understanding your medical history and researchers (when permitted) having a better chance to understand impacts of appendectomies, anesthesia, medications and more.
CURRENT PROCEDURAL TERMINOLOGY CODEBOOK CODE
This information can be standardized to a code that your insurance company could understand and index as quickly as a hospital on the other side of the world. But now, your clinic and hospital need payment for the exact procedure, medications and examinations they provided.Īnd any future medical professionals you see, even if you move to a new country, need to know about your procedure and which treatments you received.ĭid the first clinic perform any tests? What type of examination led to the appendicitis diagnosis? Which type of appendectomy did you undergo? What type of anesthesia did the hospital team use? What suturing was necessary afterward? Which medications did you receive during recovery? Did anything need adjusting? All these details need to be accurate for correct billing and for the best future care. Afterward, you stay at the hospital for a few days to recover and then go home. The doctor immediately sends you to a hospital for an appendectomy to remove your appendix. After a short examination, the physician realizes you are experiencing appendicitis. Let’s pretend you go to your doctor’s appointment with severe pain in your abdomen. Accurate and reliable health data is a goldmine of potential, but without standardization and data analysis, all that value stays buried in the murk of confusion-and the sheer, overwhelming volume of details. Now add in the incredible potential of all this medical information in terms of research-data that could help us discover cures, notice disparities and create solutions.

Multiply this by the millions of people seeking care and the complex nature and variety of health issues patients face, and you get an unbelievably complex stream of information to wrangle. They need to accurately record and relay patient data to physicians, hospitals, other healthcare providers and insurance companies while adhering to patient privacy regulations. The systems used to make this change have a lot to contend with. The technology surrounding medical data has caused a transformational shift in healthcare over the years.

