This Maybe an Odd Question:
I have been coding for anesthesia for almost 12 years and we always report the anesthesia start and stop times with total time in minutes noted on the claim.
We also report the minutes in the required field.

My question is: Is this necessary for payment? Are we wasting production time by always providing this information?

I have seen one source specifically state the start time and end time is to be reported on the claim.
However, all other sites I have scoured just say the CMS statement of how the time must be reported in actual minutes.

I only ask because we recently took over billing for a client and were reviewing older claims that nothing had the anesthesia times on, but they were paid!

This was shocking to me.
Thanks for your feedback! 😮
~Melissa, CPC