Trade press summarises the code split, the revised descriptors and the order guidance
Product news · low importance
- Announced
- 2025-12-23
HME Business reported the change nine days before it took effect, covering the three new codes, the revised A4351 and A4352 narratives, and the order guidance. It is recorded here as the point at which the change reached the trade audience, not as authority for any rule on this page.
Read closely, it reports both branches of the order rule correctly, so it is not the source of the widespread simplification that the code split required every catheter order to be rewritten.
Codes this entry bears on
Sources
- [1] CMS Catheter Changes: HCPCS Codes, Narratives, Standard Written Order Guidance for 2026 · HME Business (Arrowfly LLC), by Laurie Watanabe · checked 2026-08-07
HTTP 200, about 70 KB on 2026-08-07. Trade press, cited for the fact that the change was reported and when, never for the rule itself. Read closely, it gets the conditional order rule right and reports both branches, so it is not the origin of the oversimplification this page corrects. It does carry a typographical slip in its A4296 code list ("hydrophilic coding" for "coating"), which is why the descriptors on this page come from the DME MAC and CMS documents instead.