Enter base units, anesthesia time and a conversion factor to estimate anesthesia payment with the standard units formula.
How anesthesia billing differs
Anesthesia is the one specialty that doesn’t bill flat procedure rates: payment is built from units — base units set by the procedure’s complexity, plus time units accrued while the anesthesiologist is with the patient — multiplied by a dollar conversion factor. Enter the three components and this calculator returns the estimate, with the time-unit interval adjustable because payers differ on it.
How to use it
- Enter the base units for the procedure (from the anesthesia base-unit schedule your payer follows).
- Enter the anesthesia time in minutes.
- Set the minutes-per-time-unit (15 is the common standard) and the payer’s conversion factor.
The formula
A worked example
A 5-base-unit case running 75 minutes at 15-minute intervals accrues 5 time units — 10 total units — and at a $22 conversion factor pays $220. The same case at a commercial factor of $70 pays $700, which is the entire story of anesthesia payer mix in one comparison: the units are fixed by the case, the factor is fixed by the contract.
Estimates only — payer contracts, plan documents and the EOB are always the source of truth, and nothing here is billing, legal or medical advice. The calculator runs entirely in your browser: no patient data is entered, transmitted or stored.
Physical-status and qualifying-circumstance units, medical-direction splits and payer rounding rules all modify real payment — enter them into the base figure where applicable, and confirm against the payer’s policy.