Orthopedic Coding Alert

Question: I understand why codes are added to CPT every year, but why are codes deleted and revised every year in the CPT^® manual? And how does the American Medical Association (AMA) come to decisions?

Oregon Subscriber

Answer: To answer this question, we went to Gregory Przybylski, MD, immediate past chairman of neuroscience and director of neurosurgery at the New Jersey Neuroscience Institute, JFK Medical Center in Edison, New Jersey. Here’s what he had to say about CPT^® deletions and revisions:

“With each new edition of CPT^®, the editorial panel reviews codes that are rarely reported to consider for deletion. In consultation with the specialty societies impacted by a proposed deletion, the panel determines that certain procedures that are no longer performed, often related to technology changes, have become obsolete and removes them from the code set.

“However, should such a procedure need to be performed in the future, the unlisted code would now be applied to the procedure whose code has been previously deleted.

“The CPT revisions occur for several reasons. While some are meant to clarify the procedure itself — such are replacing “level” with “interspace” — others are intended to achieve uniformity among similar codes. Such editorial changes do not have a material impact on the physician work involved and therefore are not subsequently reviewed by the Relative Value Update Committee (RVUC).