Terminology Talk

By Dr. Linda Vidone (CareQuest Institute) and Timothy L. Brown (NADP)
Diagnostic Terminology SWG Chair and NADP Deputy Executive Director

Serving as your industry representative, NADP was instrumental in contributing to significant advances in diagnostic terminology and updates to the Current Dental Terminology (CDT) at recent stakeholder meetings this spring.

SNOMED and CDT Highlights

The Bi-Annual SNOMED business meeting was held on April 6-10 in Oslo, Norway, where the country motto is “good health good life.” The Dentistry Clinical Reference Group (CRG), Chaired by Dr. Mark Jurkovich, met twice during this business meeting with NADP attendees including Drs. Mark Jurkovich and Linda Vidone and Deputy Executive Director Timothy L. Brown.

The opening plenary business meeting highlighted the current global interoperability landscape including the progress of the Global Digital Health Partnership (GDHP) and how the international patient summary is being used to allow for interoperability and data sharing for continuity of care when people are moving between countries. Other updates touched upon the importance of collaboration. This was followed by a series of Community of Practice updates from SNOMED international.

Highlights from the two days of Dentistry Clinical Reference Group (CRG) meetings included:

• A lively discussion on the need for a Periodontal Reference set for research and learning opportunities rather than clinical documentation.
• Final review of the General Dentistry Reset including International Caries Detection and Assessment System (ICDAS) as concepts. This set has 230 concepts, which offers a diagnosis for up to 99% of all procedures provided to patients. It’s on schedule to be included in the July 1, 2025 release and then published in September of 2025.
• 39 new concepts will be added to the orthodontic set.
• A subgroup of endodontists reviewed the endodontic terms since these have not been reviewed since 2007 and removed the obsolete concepts.
• The majority of the second day was led by Dr. Jorn Andre discussing dental procedure descendants and Fully Specified Name (FSN) concepts related to restore of teeth. A FSN means a description that represents the meaning of a concept that is unambiguous and independent of the context in which it is used.

As a reminder, the Dentistry CRG group meets virtually bi-monthly on the first Wednesday of the month. The next meeting is June 4. Reach out to Dr. Mark Jurkovich, Dr. Linda Vidone or Tim Brown for details about attending these meetings.

We welcome your feedback and suggestions for future newsletters. Contact our staff liaison Timothy L. Brown (972-646-1746) or myself.

SNOMED Dentistry Clinical Reference Group participants during April meeting in Oslo, Norway. (L to R) Dr. Mark Jurkovich, HealthPartners and CRG Lead; Jorn Andre Jorgenson, Norwegian Directorate of eHealth and CRG Lead; Benoit Soucy, Canadian Dental Association; Afton Dunsmoor, American Dental Association; Rebekah Fiehn, American Dental Association; Dr. Linda Vidone, CareQuest Institute

Codes SWG to present CDT 2026 Webinar and Change Document Release Schedule

By Timothy L. Brown, NADP Deputy Executive Director

The American Dental Association’s Code Maintenance Committee (CMC) completed their review of submissions for CDT 2026 during the March 7 meeting and adopted the actions of the meeting in mid-April. The CDT 2026 will have 60 changes including 31 new codes, 23 revisions (including 9 editorial changes) and 6 deletions. The bulk of the changes are in the Maxillofacial Prosthetics and Adjunctive General Services categories with considerable changes to the anesthesia codes in both sections.

Changes to CDT 2026 include new and revised codes relating to salivary diagnostic testing, resin-based composites, deletion of outdated COVID vaccine codes, addition of a flu vaccine code, new codes for duplication of dentures, numerous new codes related to resectioning of prostheses, and many changes to anesthesia codes as mentioned above.

An initial draft of the NADP CDT 2026 Change Document is underway and will be released to the Codes Subworkgroup (SWG) in May. Participants in the NADP CDT Licensing program will begin receiving the Change Document in June once the ASCII file has been released and members have paid their CDT fees.

The Codes SWG will host a complimentary members-only webinar outlining the CDT 2026 changes on July 1 at 10:00 am Central with presenters Dr. Katie Deffke (United Concordia) and Dr. Cherag Sarkari (LIBERTY Dental), Co-Chairs of the SWG and representatives to the CMC, along with Dr. Mary Lee Conicella (Aetna Dental), former SWG chair and longtime participant in the CMC process. Participants on the July 1 webinar will receive the NADP CDT 2026 Change Document before it is released to the NADP membership in August. Details on the webinar and registration process will be announced soon.

NADP Codes SWG Co-Chairs Drs. Katie Deffke (United Concordia) and Dr. Cherag Sarkari (LIBERTY Dental), at the ADA CMC meeting in Chicago.