CPT Hierarchy errors - lost children in 2023 and changed domains

[MPhilofsky (Melanie Philofsky)]

@zhuk

If you have visits constructed from some other codes, you could do deduplication during ETL.

Lots of US EHR data holders:

@MPhilofsky

use our source encounter/visit records because they contain most or all the attributes of a visit (start_datetime, end_date, end_datetime, provider, care site, admitted from, discharged to). The HCPCS only provides a person, date and usually a provider. Therefore, we choose to use the source encounter/visit records over the anemic HCPCS records.

And regarding deduplication, unfortunately, it’s not so easy and next to impossible for some EHR data sources. The source visits/encounters are not always linked to the CPT4 “billing code”.

And now these CPT4 codes are no longer standard So, they can’t be used for network queries And many map to generic “office visit”, which doesn’t give the level of detail necessary to meet @Thomas_White use case & other’s use cases as we discussed this am on the HSIG call.

Looking at these CPT4 ‘visit’ codes. They do identify a visit, however, it is the attributes located in the description of the code which are most useful to the use cases described. And I would argue these attributes, “new patient office visit”, “treatment variability”, etc. are “Observations” and also belong in the Observation table.