Temporary CPT codes used in systems, but ultimately rejected by CMS

[piper (Piper Ranallo)]

We have more than 4M recoords encoded using CPT code 99207. Apparently the code was recommended by the AMA to bill for PPE and related costs during the Covid PHE. Ultimately the code was rejected by CMS and never added to the official CPT code set.

Anyone have an insight into how often termporary codes are proposed and used before they are (or are not) formally added to a vocabulary? Is there a way to manage these codes in the vocabulary files?

Any guidance on how to handle these in the ETLs? Exclude these records altogether, or include and map to concept_id 0?

Insight appreciated,
Piper

[MPhilofsky (Melanie Philofsky)]

I’ll let the vocab experts answer question #1.

For

@piper

Any guidance on how to handle these in the ETLs? Exclude these records altogether, or include and map to concept_id 0?

I don’t see any potential for a study involving PPE. Was the PPE used by the providers or the patients? Do you have a use case? If not, don’t bring these data into the CDM. It just lowers your data quality and increases data size which slows down the tools.

[piper (Piper Ranallo)]

@MPhilofsky

Do you have a use case? If not, don’t bring these data into the CDM. It just lowers your data quality and increases data size which slows down the tools

I can’t imagine a use case. And I agree that extracting these records is just a lot of additional noise in the data.

Thanks for the quick response, @MPhilofsky.
Piper