History

Prior to the HIPAA standards, local activity codes were used to describe the mental health services provided to clients in Washington State. On a national level, temporary codes were identified before the American Medical Association (AMA) and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) adopted mental health codes into the CPT and HCPCS code sets.

The original SERI was a website that was hosted by MSWhite & Co. and was the product of many hours of collaborative work by staff from the Mental Health Division and other DSHS departments, Regional Support Networks, Community Mental Health Agencies, and mental health advocates. This work group went through the local codes, the national temporary codes, and, finally, the adopted CPT and HCPCS codes.

One additional key output of this work group was to identify what procedure codes would be assigned to each of the modalities in the State Plan. This was an arduous task and, in the end, the State would be able to show CMS that each of the modalities in the State Plan had services that were associated with it. This is the reason why the SERI documents is grouped into modalities that match the State Plan and other non-State Plan services.