Wiki Minimum anesthesia time

[akj]

On rare occasion, we have anesthesia services that last less than 10 minutes. Our vendor is kicking the claims for these services back to us stating anesthesia less than 10 minutes is not allowed. I have asked for the vendor to provide documentation to support this. I have never read anything regarding minimum times, and google search produced nothing. I briefly searched CMS website without success. I have also searched my other 'go-to resources' with no results. If these claims are forced through the vendor, they are processed and paid. I have not received any denials.

Does anyone have any information regarding this?

 

[CodingKing]

I haven't heard about any minimum anesthesia times either. I see many sub 10 min (some so low i don't know how they even had time to induce). We pay out just fine on the base units even if the time rounds down to 0.

 

[djt123]

dtilque

7.5 minutes is billable since it will amount to 1 unit.
If it's your vendor kicking them back there may be an issue with how the units are translating from your system to theirs. I had an issue where our vendor's system was randomly changing the type of unit causing the claims to be rejected. I am with a larger medical group so I had to forward the issue to a different department to resolve, but it was definitely an issue with the unit type being randomly changed. Perhaps yours could be a similar issue.