The agenda for the June 2017 CPT Editorial Panel meeting in Boston has been posted, here.
According to an online AMA calendar, the agenda was posted on March 29. That's important, because non-pathology public comments were accepted until May 19, eleven more days. But MoPath comments were accepted only until April 7, and other lab comments til April 14. Those dates are past. (Circle your calendar now for July 13, so you can see the September CPT agenda while there's still time to comment in mid summer. Take your laptop to the beach...)
There are about 40 non lab agenda items. There are 6 MoPath items and 3 other lab items.
WIth the agenda numbers in parenthesis, the MoPath items are (#15) TFGBI in corneal dystrophy, (#16) EZH2 for hematologic neoplasms, (#17) BTK and PLG2 variants for CLL, (#18) Sept9 Promoter Methylation Analysis [revision], (#19) Tier 2 codes for PRAME and LINC00518, (#20) panel code for panethnic carrier screening.
Others include (#21) Rapid GI Pathogen target testing, and of general interest, (#39) Cat III code for HPV extended genotyping, and (#6) revisions to the FNA procedure codes. Very few lab codes ever appear in Cat III.
Telemedicine
CPT will take 4 G codes created by CMS for telemedicine and convert them into CPT codes in the 99XXX series. When this happens, CMS generally deletes the corresponding G codes.
Category III
Despite the continued rarity of most Category III codes in CMS utilization databases and the reputation for poor payment by commercial payers as well, there are 12 Cat III applications. One of the applications is for a set of 5 codes to reflect behavioral counseling through an online diabetes prevention curriculum. In total, almost 500 Cat III codes have been issued by AMA, though many of the earlier ones have been sunsetted.
