Wiki Injections & moderate sedation

[mzblackmon12@gmail.com]

HELP!!! I have a physician that is doing LESI, CESI and other Nerve Block injections and has been adding 99144-Moderate sedation first 30 minutes. I do the coding for several other physicians and they have NEVER added the moderate sedation code. Is this something that is normally done?

 

[marvelh]

Some providers performing these pain management procedures do use moderate sedation for the patients while others do not.

I strongly recommend reviewing the requirements for billing moderate sedation in the CPT section guidelines. Also there have been a couple of CPT Assistant issues that have clarified that the intra-service time for the moderate sedation must be 16 minutes or more to meet the time threshold to report the 99144 code.