The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) announces the release of Fiscal Year 2012 updates for the Clinical Classifications Software (CCS) for Services and Procedures. These files can be used with databases available from the Agency’s Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP) or other administrative healthcare databases.

The CCS for Services and Procedures software provides a method for classifying Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) codes and Healthcare Common Procedure Coding System (HCPCS) codes into clinically meaningful procedure categories. It takes more than 9,000 CPT/HCPCS codes and 6,000 HCPCS codes and collapses them into 244 clinically meaningful categories that may be more useful for presenting descriptive statistics than individual CPT or HCPCS codes. For example, CCS for Services and Procedures can be used to identify populations for procedure-specific studies, or to develop statistical reports providing information (such as charges and length of stay) about groups of procedures.

The CCS-Services and Procedures software is updated each year; the current version is based on CPT codes that are valid at any time between January 1992 and January 2011 and HCPCS codes valid at any time between January 2002 and January 2011. The CCS for Services and Procedures software is available for download from the HCUP-US Website’s Tools & Software page.