[1] The CPT code set describes medical, surgical, and diagnostic services and is designed to communicate uniform information about medical services and procedures among physicians, coders, patients, accreditation organizations, and payers for administrative, financial, and analytical purposes.
[5] CPT is identified by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) as Level 1 of the Healthcare Common Procedure Coding System.
The PMAG is composed of performance measurement experts representing the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), the American Medical Association (AMA), the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO), the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) and the Physician Consortium for Performance Improvement.
The PMAG may seek additional expertise and/or input from other national health care organizations, as necessary, for the development of Category II codes.
These digits are not intended to reflect the placement of the code in the regular (Category I) part of the CPT codebook.
[19] In the past, AMA offered a limited search of the CPT manual for personal, non-commercial use on its web site.
[21] As the AMA decided in April 1960, the Current Medical Terminology (CMT) handbook was first published in June 1962 – 1963 to standardize terminology of the Standard Nomenclature of Diseases and Operations (SNDO) and International Classification of Diseases (ICD), and for the analysis of patient records, and was aided by an IBM computer.