CPT Panel Expands Public Access to Meeting Deliberations
Change comes amid multiple calls to reform or replace the code set.
Last week, during a public town hall, the CPT Editorial Panel (Panel) announced operational changes that will increase public access to its proceedings.
Publication of Meeting Minutes: The Panel announced that it will release full initial meeting minutes publicly for the first time after the September 2026 Panel meeting. Currently, only a high-level summary of meeting actions, referred to as “Panel Actions” (e.g., votes), is posted on its website. This document will continue to be posted.
Meeting Confidentiality: Meeting participants will no longer be required to sign a pre-meeting confidentiality attestation due to the loosened confidentiality policy implemented in 2025. Meeting participants will still be prohibited from attributing statements made during a meeting to a specific individual or taking images or video recordings of Panel meetings.
Code Applications Will No Longer Be Confidential: Recipients may share them as they would any public document. Moving forward, the American Medical Association (AMA) will maintain a publicly accessible archive of code applications. Applicants are asked to continue coordinating with Panel staff when communicating with outside stakeholders about code applications to ensure efficient communication.
Streamline Interested Party (IP) Process: The existing IP process, which allows public stakeholders to request copies of code applications, will be streamlined to make it easier to access multiple code applications in a single request.
Category III Codes Release Schedule Updated: A couple of weeks before the town hall, the Panel announced it would change the schedule for releasing Category III codes from twice a year to three times a year. Category III codes are a temporary set of codes for emerging technologies, services, and procedures.
These changes were presented as part of an ongoing process the Panel has pursued over the past ten years to increase meeting transparency. This includes posting Panel actions (2011), creating a public process for requesting copies of CPT applications (2016), holding hybrid meetings open to all registrants (2020), and loosening confidentiality rules to allow greater disclosure of meeting deliberations (2025).
While the growing transparency of the CPT process cannot be denied, the reality is that the current system, in which CPT, copyrighted by the AMA and used for almost all U.S. healthcare transactions for physicians and outpatient services, is under attack on multiple fronts.
On August 10, the Council for Affordable Health Coverage (CAHC) submitted a letter to the leadership of congressional health committees on the CPT code set. The group is asking Congress to examine whether the ICD-10 Procedure Coding System, currently used to report inpatient hospital procedures, could be expanded to cover physician offices and other outpatient settings. They argue that 1) there is a cost to maintaining two coding systems; and 2) there is a conflict of interest that the AMA is responsible for maintaining the code set that its own members use.
Earlier in the month, the PatientRightsAdvocate.org (PRA) filed a lawsuit against the AMA to make CPT codes public. The lawsuit seeks to have the codes published online and to allow the public to access them for free.
More recently, in the CY 2027 Medicare Physician Fee Schedule Proposed Rule, which is open for comment, CMS is seeking input on alternatives to the CPT code set amid concerns about what the government has described as an “obvious conflict of interest.”
Last year, Senator Bill Cassidy (LA-R) accused the AMA of being a government-backed monopoly. He argued that the AMA’s “exorbitant fees” were raising healthcare costs.
Surely, the AMA Board took this current environment into account as it considered potential policy changes.
During the town hall, questions were raised about whether greater public transparency could also create a greater administrative burden for those submitting CPT applications. Questions also raised concerns about potential confidential information included in CPT applications and other logistical issues. CPT staff indicated that additional information on these new policies would be released soon.
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For more information and questions, please contact:
Sheila Madhani
Madhani Healthcare Consulting
Email: smadhani@madhani-health.com
Tel: (202) 679-2977