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THE HOLIDAYS HAVE come and gone. Now, we must focus our professional attention on what did not "go" with the ringing in of the new year: those 2018 Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) code updates. As is customary for every January 1st, the American Medical Association (AMA) has provided healthcare professionals with new, revised, and deleted CPT codes. This article will only touch on some of the 170 new codes, 60 revised codes, and the 82 deleted codes. These updates leave us with 10,155 CPT codes. A full listing of the changes is found in Appendix B of the 2018 CPT code book.
In the evaluation and management section, there were five code additions, four revisions, and two deletions. For the hospital observation service codes, the site was added to the descriptor to show that it was an outpatient hospital. The anticoagulation management subsection (99363 and 99364) were deleted. Five care management codes were added, which included care planning for patients with cognitive impairment, psychiatric collaborative care, and care management for behavioral health conditions.
For the anesthesia section, there were five additions and five deletions. The additions are all related to endoscopic gastrointestinal procedures. The deletions included two codes that were gastrointestinal in nature but will be covered in the newly added codes while the other three were for procedures that had "extremely low utilization."
The surgery section had the most code changes with 42 additions, 24 revisions, and 19 deletions....