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Anesthesia Coding Alert

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Coding for Follow-Up CABG Anesthesia

Published on Fri Dec 14, 2012

Question: A patient underwent CABG one day, and it was reopened the next. The same anesthesiologist was present during both procedures. He did not indicate use of the pump oxygenator on the second day, but did document hypothermia and hypotension. Is this medically possible? Some of the anesthesia codes seem to fit in some ways, but not others. For example, 00562 is for re-operation for CABG, but should be more than one month after the original operation. How should we code the second surgery? Wisconsin Subscriber Answer: Although you don’t indicate it in your question, chances are good that a complication occurred (such as postoperative bleeding). The anesthesia code will depend on whether the second procedure involved the heart, pericardial sac, or great vessels of the chest (00561 as pump oxygenator wasn’t indicated) or direct bypass grafting (00566 as pump oxygenator wasn’t indicated). Both of these code selections include utilization [...]
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