HST Coding Updates: Earn Continuing Education

Learning Objectives: Understand that the AMA’s CPT Panel approved a new code set for home sleep testing (HST) and the deletion of CPT codes 95800, 95801, and 95806 during their February 2025 meeting; Outline the projected HST code progression into 2026 and 2027; Recognize that before full implementation, the new codes must be valued by RUC, then adopted in CMS’s payment schedules, which may influence market adoption and access to different HST devices.

Learning Objectives: Describe limitations of the apnea-hypopnea index; Define the sleep apnea-specific hypoxic burden as a metric developed by researchers at Harvard Medical School that measures the amount and duration of oxygen desaturation during sleep; Compare therapy effectiveness using different metrics.

Learning Objectives: Recognize that women with OSA often exhibit atypical or subtle symptoms; Explain that these atypical symptoms in women often lead to misdiagnoses, such as anxiety, depression, or migraines, resulting in symptom-based treatments rather than addressing the underlying sleep disorder; Identify proposed strategies to improve equity in OSA diagnosis and treatment for women.

Learning Objectives: Understand that both Samsung and Apple received FDA clearance for over-the-counter smartwatch features designed to assess sleep apnea risk—but these alerts are not automatically triggered; Recognize that Samsung’s feature works on-demand (requiring a two-night oxygen data capture), while Apple’s accelerometer-based feature operates opportunistically, and only after the user sets up sleep tracking and meets FDA-intended user criteria; Identify performance characteristics from FDA documentation. 

Learning Objectives: Explain that investigational treatments for narcolepsy type 1 (NT1) are now aiming at the root cause—the loss of orexin-producing neurons—by mimicking orexin signaling, in contrast to existing symptom-based therapies; Recognize that researchers are also evaluating orexin-targeting compounds for narcolepsy type 2 (NT2) and idiopathic hypersomnia (IH), even though these conditions aren’t characterized by orexin deficiency; List several pharmaceutical companies and their orexin drug candidate developmental stages.