AAOS Now – November 2016
by Kim Pollock, RN, MBA, CPC
Spine surgeons face a multitude of Current Procedural Terminology ® (CPT) code changes, effective Jan. 1, 2017. This article provides a summary of these changes so practices can get a head start on understanding their implications. A complete listing of changes can be found in the 2017 CPT manual.
Approach and Visualization Definitions
The Spine and Spinal Cord section of the Nervous System codes in CPT 2017 provides new definitions of key terms and surgical approaches to further clarify these CPT code descriptors, as shown in Table 1.
Surgical CPT codes are presumed to be open unless the code descriptor states otherwise.