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The Code Exists. The Check Doesn't.

Today's Money Plumbing makes the case that a CPT code is the difference between selling software and selling a billable service. True — but a code is not a check. Here is every AI-analysis CPT code Medicare's physician-claims data has ever paid, drawn as one chart: the six-year Category III valley, the one conversion that made it out, and the shelf of codes that never registered eleven patients. Press replay, hover the dots.

Built on ↓ AAPC — "AMA Posts CPT Early Release Codes" (effective July 1, 2026) · companion to today's Money Plumbing
Also: AMA — CPT codes for AI-enabled health services
Data: Medicare Physician & Other Practitioners by Geography (FFS), CY2013–CY2024 · mimi_ws_1.datacmsgov.mupphy_geo via MIMI Labs
Twelve years, four numbers

What "billable AI" earns

Every AI-analysis code that appears anywhere in Medicare's 2024 physician-claims file adds up to 37,492 services and $10.0M paid — total, nationally, for the year. The remote-monitoring codes ran ~$259M standardized over the same twelve months. The AI lane on the fee schedule is open, and it is nearly empty.

$10.0M
total 2024 Part B payment, every AI-analysis code combined
6 yrs
from FFR-CT's first 497 Cat III claims to Cat I conversion
29,270
75580 services in year one as a Category I code
12
AI codes checked that never clear the 11-patient floor
The chart

The Category III valley, drawn to scale

Navy lines = Category III codes — the temporary, experimental lane where AI services start. Red = Category I — the lane with real RVUs. The dashed gray line is the human-read version of the retinal service, for scale. Log scale, services per year: every navy line spends years under 10,000 services nationally — then watch what conversion did for FFR-CT in 2024.

AI-analysis services billed to Medicare Part B (physician claims) · 2013–2024 · log scale
Hover any dot for the year's ledger: services, patients, dollars, price per run. The red dashed jump is the same clinical service crossing from Category III (0501T–0504T) to Category I (75580) on Jan 1, 2024.
The ghost shelf — checked, never seen

Twelve more algorithmic/quantitative codes appear in no year at all — fewer than 11 traditional-Medicare patients nationally, every year since each code went live. Including the one today's newsletter prices out:

0691T · AI vertebral-fracture CT — the Money Plumbing example 0697T/0698T · quant. MRCP 0710T–0713T · arterial plaque quantification 0721T/0722T · quant. CT tissue characterization 0740T/0741T · algorithmic insulin dosing 0765T · algorithmic ECG add-on
Read the floor, not the ceiling. This chart sees only fee-for-service physician/supplier claims. Hospital-outpatient billing — where a code like 0691T would most plausibly live — Medicare Advantage, and commercial payers are all invisible to it. CMS deletes rows under 11 patients instead of printing zero, so "never appears" means "fewer than 11 nationally," not "never used." And a one-year blip like 0764T (695 ECG runs at $3.53 in 2023, absent again in 2024) is exactly the kind of small-n artifact you should refuse to extrapolate — in either direction.
The two escape routes both took years. 92229 (autonomous retinal AI) went straight to Category I in 2021 — and still took four years to reach 5,113 services, while its per-service price fell from $32 to $27 and the human-read version of the same service kept outbilling it. FFR-CT took the long road: six years of Category III grind, never topping 16,000 family-wide services, then 29,270 services and $7.3M in year one as 75580. Conversion — not code creation — was the revenue event in both stories.
A Category III code is a tracking number, not a business model. What it buys you is the right to accumulate the evidence that converts it — five-ish years of volume data, while the per-study checks stay small enough to round to zero. If your revenue plan starts with this July's new AI codes, your actual product for the next five years is the registry. 🔮 Budget accordingly.
Read the source: AMA's mid-year CPT release → Or read today's newsletter →
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Data: Medicare Physician & Other Practitioners by Geography & Service, national rows, extracts 2013-12-31–2024-12-31, mimi_ws_1.datacmsgov.mupphy_geo via MIMI Labs. Codes checked: 0501T–0504T, 75580, 0623T–0626T, 0648T/0649T, 0691T, 0697T/0698T, 0710T–0713T, 0721T/0722T, 0740T/0741T, 0764T/0765T, 92227–92229. FFR-CT family line sums 0501T+0502T+0503T+0504T; plaque line sums 0623T–0626T; quant-MR line sums 0648T+0649T; human-read line sums 92227+92228. Payment = actual Medicare paid, facility+office summed. FFS only; physician/supplier claims only — hospital outpatient (OPPS) and Medicare Advantage excluded; CMS suppresses cells <11. Ghost-code descriptors abbreviated from AMA Category III listings. Verified 2026-07-25.
⚠︎ AI-generated · not reviewed by a human · verify against the linked sources before relying on it