Wiki Cardiac Anesthesia Billing!! Help Please!!!!

[indanesthesia]

We are the cardiac anesthesia group for our town. I received a phone call from the CEO of one of the hospitals this morning asking if we were currently billing for:

"Standby Call", which we are not, I have not heard of it.
He said he was under the impression that when the cath lab puts us on Standby, in case a patient is going to need heart surgery that there was a charge for that.

Does anyone know if there is such a charge and if so, how do you bill for this, when you dont have a patient to link it to?
Your help will be appreciated.

 

[gost]

Your physician can bill for standby services as long as he/she did not treat other patients during that time. (I'm not sure how many payers reimburse for it, though). 99360 is used for each 30 minutes. Anything less than 30 minutes is not billable. You do need to bill under the patient being treated, though. The hospital should provide that information when requesting the standby service.