HCPCS stands for Healthcare Common Procedure Coding System. HCPCS codes are commonly pronounced like “hick pics.”
Searching for medical codes
I occasionally need to search for medical codes—ICD-9 codes, ICD-10 codes, SNOMED codes, etc.—including HCPCS codes. Here’s some data that is supposed to contain a certain kind of code; does it? Or, more importantly, this text is supposed to have been scrubbed of medical codes; was it?
The most accurate way to search for HCPCS codes would be to have a complete list of codes and search for each one. There are a couple reasons why this isn’t so useful. First of all, I’m doing a quick scan, not writing data validation software. So a quick-and-dirty regular expression is fine. In fact, it’s better: I may be more interested in finding things that look like HCPCS codes than actual HCPCS codes. The former would include some typos or codes that were added after my script was written.
Copyright
Another advantage of using a regular expression that approximates HCPCS codes is that HCPCS codes are copyrighted. I don’t know whether a script using a list of HCPCS codes would be fair use, but it doesn’t matter if I’m using a regular expression.
According to Wikipedia, “CPT is a registered trademark of the American Medical Association, and its largest single source of income.” CPT is part of HCPCS, namely Level I. It is controversial that CPT codes are a commercial product whose use is required by law.
Code patterns
There are three levels of HCPCS codes. Level I is synonymous with CPT and consists of five-digit numbers. It’s easy to search for five-digit numbers, say with the regular expression \d{5}, but of course many five-digit numbers are not medical codes. But if text that has supposedly been stripped of medical codes (and zip codes) has a lot of five-digit numbers, it could be something to look into.
Level II and Level III codes are five-character codes consisting of four digits and either an F or a T. So you might search on \d{4}[FT]. While a five-digit number is likely to be a false positive when searching for HCPCS codes, four-digits following by an F or T is more likely to be a hit.