Anesthesia Coding Guidelines — Basics of Anesthesia Coding

Anesthesia Coding Guidelines — Basics of Anesthesia Coding https://www.cco.us/ceu-anesthesia-cla...

I like doing the anesthesia coding maybe because it's got... it's like E&M but it's smaller. It has its own little area in the CPT book and once you know the basics, you're good to go. There's really not that many anesthesia codes when you compare it to the volume of the CPT.

The first thing you need to know, there's 3 things you basically need to know when you're doing, again, basic anesthesia coding. You need to know type, the BTM and find the code. So let's click on the answer here and let's look at the paper that I worked up. Oh, that's very tiny. Oh, there we go.

Alright, the first thing you want to do, what type of anesthesia are you dealing with? So these are the types that you work with. There's endotracheal, epidural, spinal, general, regional, local and then patient-controlled. But really, patient-controlled is a little bit different because that's when they give you that morphine pump. If you've ever had to have that and the patient literally... you know, it's set up that it can't be you know, given closer than every 30 minutes and the patient can give them the morphine when they want it so the nurse doesn't have to keep coming in.

Endotracheal is whatever they put a tube down someone's throat into the trachea and that's for any type of procedure that they do where they... you know, when people say, "Well, they put me under." Or you're having you know, major surgery, then that's the type they're going to do. Also, you'll have a separate report, an anesthesia report as well as an op report. You don't want to get those confused. When you do it... wen you do an op report, you're coding for what the doctor does, the procedure that he did to you. Then it will say, maybe on there, you know the type of anesthesia that was given. But when you look at your bill, you'll also see that the anesthesiologist billed you as well. He's a physician and he is going to get paid for his services and he writes a separate report.

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