Disclaimer
Reference tool, not medical or billing advice. Data auto-updates from official CMS releases each quarter, but always cross-check against the current AMA or CMS publication before using a code in clinical care or billing. You are the one signing off on the chart, not us.
What sources we use
Every code in this tool was extracted from a public CMS dataset. The complete list, with versions, hashes, and direct download links, lives on the Sources page. We do not scrape or import from any non-CMS source.
What is not included
The full AMA CPT long descriptors and the AMA CPT guidelines are commercially licensed and are not redistributed in this tool. The short descriptors you see for CPT codes are the CMS-published versions, which are public. The longer plain-English explanations were written from scratch using general medical knowledge, without reference to the AMA long-descriptor text.
A similarity check runs against every generated explanation. Anything that scores too close to known AMA phrasing patterns is flagged and held back from publication until a human rewrites it. Flagged entries are visible to the maintainer in pipeline/review_queue.json and never appear on the public site.
Coverage information
LCD (Local Coverage Determination) references in this tool are structural mappings only. They tell you a code is referenced inside a particular LCD, with a link to the official CMS Medicare Coverage Database entry. The decision text itself, including any AMA or ADA content embedded in CMS LCD documents, lives on CMS, not here.
Dental (CDT) codes are filtered out at the parser level.
NCCI references
NCCI procedure-to-procedure conflict tables are extracted from the CMS quarterly publication. The pairs, modifier indicators, and effective dates are structural data. Whether a particular billing situation actually triggers an edit depends on the carrier, payer rules, modifiers used, and clinical documentation, none of which this tool can know.
No clinical or billing advice
This site does not provide medical advice and does not establish a coder-client or provider-patient relationship. Codes shown here may have been deleted, replaced, or reinterpreted since our last build. Always verify against the current AMA, CMS, or carrier publication before using a code on a real claim or in a clinical chart.
Privacy
The site stores theme preference, recent lookups, and bookmarks in your browser local storage. Nothing is sent anywhere. There are no analytics, no third-party trackers, no fingerprinting.
Liability
This is a free volunteer-maintained reference tool. The maintainers make no warranty of accuracy, fitness, or fitness for any particular use. Use at your own judgment.