The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) announces the release of Fiscal Year 2008 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 health care 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. The contains the standard CCS procedure categories, with the addition of specific categories unique to the professional service and supply codes in CPT/HCPCS.

The CCS for Services and Procedures 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 for Services and Procedures software is available for download from the Tools & Software page on the HCUP-US Website. For more information, please visit the CCS for Services and Procedures page, or contact the HCUP Central Distributor by e-mail at HCUPDistributor@ahrq.gov.