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Health care organizations—from individual family physicians to university health systems and health plans—all shoulder the costs of quality measure reporting. A large health system spent over $5.6 million on quality reporting in 2018, with over $600,000 paid to vendors to report and share quality data, and including more than 100,000 hours of health care staff time.

Quality measurement and reporting requires significant staff effort and expense because of the manual processes involved in the collection, exchange, management and analysis of health care data. A report found that clinicians bear a significant proportion of the cost of quality measurement reporting—an estimated $15.4 billion—including for chart abstraction, data validation and measure reporting. Other industries have leveraged modern information technology to reduce these costs of data management.

Quality measurement is the application of standardized quality measures to evaluate the health outcomes and experiences of care provided to individuals and populations, as well as the structures and processes used by organizations and clinicians to deliver care. The results of quality measurement guide quality improvement and can be used in accountability and value-based purchasing programs.