Tuesday, July 28, 2020

AMA Publishes Panel Actions from May 2020 CPT Meeting

I believe the May 14, 2020 CPT Editorial Panel Meeting would have been held in Chicago, but became the first AMA CPT virtual meeting.   

Typically, AMA publishes brief minutes of its "panel actions" 4 weeks after the meeting, but this cycle, it took about 8 weeks and appeared July 10.   Find the "panel actions" document here.  (Find the master home page for all panel action documents here.)

There were some 54 agenda items, of which I tally 11 as withdrawn and 4 as rejected.    In the lab world, 7 new drug level measurement codes were added, and a few administrative MAAA codes were created, but 5 other lab agenda items were either withdrawn or rejected.  (Often, when the panel indicates it doesn't support a code creation, the stakeholder withdraws it rather than have a futile vote resulting in pro forma rejection).   


The next (virtual) AMA CPT meeting will be October 1-3, 2020.  The real meeting would have been in New Orleans.  I guess you can watch from home with a French Quarter screen saver.

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I noticed that on the panel agenda for PLA codes (those submitted in April 2020), 20 were accepted and 1 rejected.  We don't know the rejected ones, but the codes missing from the July PLA list that were submitted as April PLA candidates included item 100529 "LEVL breath acetone test" and 100533 "SnapshotNIR" multiple gas test and 100545 "Melody" breast cancer biomarker test.