# Emergency Intubation Documentation



## muem7m (Sep 14, 2011)

Looking for any specific emergency intubation documentation guidelines for one of my physicians.


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## Mojo (Sep 15, 2011)

From Hospitalist Today:
Endotracheal intubation, emergency (CPT 31500) Medicare cautions physicians to use this code in emergency or crisis situations, not for elective intubation. Your documentation should support an emergent need through appropriate ICD-9 codes. You may also want to submit a procedure note to support the emergent nature of the procedure.

Like the other codes in this article, CPT 31500 is exempt from modifier -51, so you don’t need to use a “multiple procedures” indication when billing it with other procedures.



From a coding standpoint, I would look for documented critical care time of at least 30 minutes since the criticality of the patient required the intervention of the intubation. The time involved with the 31500 including administering medications of rapid sequence intubation (RSI) should not be reported as part of the critical care time and is considered to be inherent to 31500. CPT 31500 is reported separately with 99291.


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