CPT Code Ownership Controversy

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CPT Code Ownership Controversy

Posted by I. Valdes on Friday May 04, 2001 @ 10:29 AM
from the CPT codes dept.
Thanks to John S. Gage for this link. MyHealthScore.com a site that bills itself as 'Healthcare Quality Information for Consumers' has an article and active discussion about the American Medical Associations ownership and rigorous defense of that ownership of CPT Codes: '...Imagine a restaurant patron sitting down for lunch. The waitress approaches and requires the diner to pay a $10.00 fee to look at the menu before ordering! This reflects the American Medical Association (AMA) policy for charging patients to view the treatment codes and descriptions employed by all the physicians in this country using the MyHealthScore.com (formerly MECQA) web site. Under these conditions, most of us would take our business elsewhere, if there was another choice...' This also effects open software engineers since costly access to these codes restricts developer participation and introduces the requirement for proprietary intellectual property for the functioning of open software systems. Digg this article

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Re: CPT Code Ownership Controversy
by dougie on Monday May 07, 2001 @ 07:20 PM

So thats why I could not find a single free CPT site on the web. Found several ICD9 sites, but no CPT sites... Thanks!

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Re: CPT Code Ownership Controversy
by Tony Robertson on Thursday May 08, 2003 @ 05:27 PM

I am a student and cannot afford high-priced, government regulated refrence materials. I am not a professional coder looking to update their refrence material, I am just wishing to pass this class. Have you found any place that a poor student such as myself can come across this material? I aperciate you getting back with me if you have. Thanx, Tony

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Re: CPT Code Ownership Controversy
by Thomas Good on Friday October 24, 2003 @ 12:42 PM

The age of HIPAA has only exacerbated this problem.
We are required to embed these codes into 837p transactions but cannot have access to them freely.
The greed (and avarice?) of the AMA is harming the
very people they are sworn to protect...as a software developer working on a hipaa compliant billing module I find that I apparently have little recourse but follow the lead of EDS in their PES product (Provider Electronic Solutions) - have a table embedded in the SRV section of a claim where CPT code/descriptions are stored so they must only be entered once. This is a workaround but really quite lame. Unfortunately the AMA can't be sued under the FOIA as they are not publicly funded - in theory. But as always it is the public that pays.
We are required to use a proprietary code set in our transactions...it is a published standard required by government - and yet we don't have access to it. I would define that as an oxymoron.

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Re: CPT Code Ownership Controversy
by Roxie on Tuesday March 01, 2005 @ 12:52 PM

I am a POOR Single mother that is in school i need to find a site that i can get FREE Cpt codes for my homework. So if anyone out there in this Big Wide world can help me I would appreciate it

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Re: CPT Code Ownership Controversy
by Devon on Friday June 09, 2006 @ 10:22 AM

http://www.saagii.com/CPTCodeListPage0.htm 80+ PAGES OF CPT CODES. I am just going to take all this and place it in excel for ease of control f. Hope it helps

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