In 2021, the Current Procedural Terminology (CPT*) Editorial Panel revised the office/outpatient evaluation and management (E/M) codes (99202–99205, 99211–99215). For CPT 2023, the panel has revised additional families of E/M codes to be consistent with the changes to the office/outpatient E/M codes. This column focuses on the changes to the hospital inpatient and hospital observation E/M codes that surgeons routinely use.
Will there continue to be separate E/M codes for inpatient and observation care in 2023?
No, for 2023, the codes for reporting observation care services (99217–99220) will be deleted and observation care services will be merged into the codes previously used to report only inpatient care services (99221–99233, 99238–99239). See Table 1 for the revised 2023 code descriptors. Although the same code will be used to report either inpatient or observation care services, you will still need to know the facility status of the patient to accurately report the place of service code as either hospital inpatient (21) or hospital outpatient (22).
