When to Use Anesthesia Modifier Coding

When to Use Anesthesia Modifier Coding http://www.cco.us/ceu-intro-cpt-coding-surgery-hcpsc-modifiers-class-yt

Q: [Anesthesia Modifier Coding] Can you go over anesthesia modifiers and when to use them?

A: Yes, I can. Again, I’m going to bring in my doctored up coding manual. I used to be a real neat freak, believe it or not, and I had everything all perfectly lined up. What I found is that if you make your writing too neat it doesn’t jump out off the page at you and that’s what you really want. So, don’t be a neat freak. Don’t worry about writing notes in your book. They are allowed. I just had someone e-mail me yesterday saying, someone came with their chapter and told them that they couldn’t have the E/M tables written in their book like I’ve been teaching since 1999. So, I sent an e-mail off to our contacts at AAPC and they verified, “No, that’s fine,” so I was able to take that and reply back to the student, “Relax, it’s OK.” They do allow writing in your books. They just don’t allow you to tape, paste, staple, nothing separate, but if you handwrite on a page that already exists in your manuals that’s totally allowable. As you can see, I take great advantage of that allowance.

The question was specifically about anesthesia modifiers. Typically, when we think of a modifier, we think of a two-digit code. In CPT for anesthesia, modifiers can be these physical status modifiers. If you look at them, P1, P2, all the way down to P6, and that’s going to be appended to the CPT code on the claim form to tell the story of how sick a patient was, because if you think about anesthesia, they’re trying to quantify the risk. How risky was the procedure, the anesthesia?

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