CPT Codes, Sermo, and CMS

Sermo is generally regarded as “Facebook for doctors.” Although it is not clear that “Facebook for doctors” is even a useful idea, it is certainly true that Sermo is an extremely popular community and probably the largest doctor-only social network.

In May 2007, Sermo and the American Medical Association (AMA), the largest and most powerful medical association in the United States, announced that Sermo would become the official social media site for the AMA. As you can imagine, this was pretty big news.

In 2009 that relationship imploded.

A major part of the fallout was a blog post from the CEO of Sermo, Daniel Palestrant, regarding Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) codes. CPT stands for and is an ontology for medical procedures that the AMA developed. If you have read Chapter 3, you know that CPT procedure codes are the central ontology for doctors and hospitals to get paid in the United States.