My past job I coded off operative reports for surgeons, I changed my career to anesthesia billing and am finding it very difficult to code off the anesthesia record with only a few words describing the surgery. They are very vague and I have a list of different CPT codes that I can use from their vague description. For example they asked me to code "cardiac catherazation", there are a number of different CPT codes to use how do you know which one, I am told whatever is the closest. I don't work that way, I am wondering if I had the operative report or the CPT code that the hospital used can I use that to code off of it? How accurate should we bill for Anesthesia, is it really so different than surgeon's billing? I can see if we were only putting in the ASA code in our system but charge entry needs the CPT code to cross over for the ASA code. The bills for some insurance companies go out with just the ASA code on them, while others go out with the CPT code and ASA code on them. Any advice or how I can approach them is greatly appreciated!