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Wiki Help with anesthesia time

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pittiemom2722

pittiemom2722

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I'm looking for help please. I usually code ortho but I'm helping to cover a gal who is out on disability who codes anesthesia. I've picked up on things fairly well but I need some guidance on labor/delivery time coding. I have the start/end times available but there are a few cases that the times go over the allotting '999' that I'm allowed to enter. One patient was over 24 hours and one was around 16 hours. I'm trying to figure out how to enter the claims. Would I enter two claims with them being back-to-back being one minute apart to cover the entire anesthesia date & time? Hopefully that makes sense the way I explained it.

Thank you anyone who can offer their help!!
 
Without knowing which system you're using, it's difficult to answer your question. Please know that you may only file one claim, so it would be best to look at past anesthesia coding or ask your manager.
 
Hi primrose1, when our facility went from paper records to "live" in Epic a few years back - we utilize "face time" to document time. This could be for an anesthesiologist or a CRNA providing a labor epidural (depending on which location at our facility it could be one or the other or both monitoring a labor epidural).
For example an anesthesiologist applies the labor epidural. They will enter "face time start" with time such as 0807 and they will enter a "face time stop" and enter the stop time such as "0907" after attending to the patient. Usually there is only one "face time start" and "face time stop" but depending on the case there may be several appearances throughout the labor epidural. It is not uncommon to see sometimes two or three (or even more) "face time start" and "face time stop". This is all billable time. So for example in Epic which our facility utilizes I would simply enter all the times "face time start" and "face time stop" each of our providers entered with their times to the charge 01967 for billing purposes. Unsure if you need this or not but the rule of thumb at our facility is that whoever has the most time on the case is the one that gets to bill the procedure.
Our anesthesia record provides documented proof if any payer was to question the times along with any notes the provider may have made during the patient's labor process.
Thanks for listening,
Dana Chock, RHIT, CPC, CANPC, CHONC, CPMA, CPB
Coding Associate Analyst

Also, if you have a particular case or two that you are really unsure of ~ please feel free to share the basic details.
 
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