Answers / The anesthesia record
The anesthesia IDR record
CMS published 242,469 federal IDR disputes with anesthesia line items for 2025. Clinicians won 82.8 percent of decided disputes, the median award was 5.2 times the qualifying payment amount across decided line items, the median decision took 31 days, and the median award multiple rose through the year to 6.1x in the fourth quarter.
Volume that more than doubled in a year
Anesthesia filed about 24,600 disputes in the third quarter of 2024. A year later the quarterly number was 66,715. The 2025 total of 242,469 disputes makes anesthesiology the third largest specialty in No Surprises Act arbitration, behind emergency medicine and radiology. The growth is not mysterious: groups that proved the process on one facility's claims rolled it out across their books, and endoscopy anesthesia in particular turned out to batch well.
The codes doing the work
GI endoscopy anesthesia dominates. Screening colonoscopy anesthesia (00812) led with 28,711 disputes and a median decided award of $1,620 against a $247 median QPA, about 9.5 times the benchmark. Upper GI (00731) and combined procedures (00813) each cleared $1,600 median awards at 6.5 to 6.9 times QPA. Outside the GI suite, abdominal wall procedures (00840) paid a median of $2,145, and labor epidurals (01967) paid a median of $4,193, the largest median dollar award among the top codes even at a lower multiple against obstetric QPAs that start higher.
Payers and how the year moved
United Healthcare was the most frequent counterparty at 56,157 disputes, with Cigna entities combining for more than 66,000 and Aetna at 28,143. Win rates held between 80 and 86 percent every quarter. The number that moved was the award: the median decided multiple climbed from 4.9x in late 2024 to 6.1x in the fourth quarter of 2025, meaning arbitrators were accepting progressively stronger provider offers as the record built.
Using the record to price offers
Baseball-style arbitration punishes bad numbers, and the published record is the honest guide to what a credible anesthesia offer looks like by code and payer. A group pricing a colonoscopy anesthesia offer has 28,711 published 2025 data points to anchor on. Lido IDR builds offers from exactly that data and files for a flat fee per arbitration; the underlying record is explorable at idrexplorer.com.
Price your cases against the record
Lido IDR anchors anesthesia offers to the published awards for your codes and payers, then files for a flat fee per arbitration. Talk to an IDR specialist.