How Johns Hopkins Spent $5M and 108,478 Hours on Quality Reporting in One Year

Quality reporting is an essential revenue cycle task tied closely to reimbursement, but it can cost providers big time, a new study says.

CMS says it collects quality data from hospitals paid under the IPPS with the goal of driving quality improvement through measurement and transparency to help consumers make more informed decisions, however gathering this information for CMS is proving time consuming and expensive for hospitals.

The new study published in JAMA set out to evaluate externally reported inpatient quality metrics for adult patients and estimate the cost of data collection and reporting, independent of quality-improvement efforts, and the conclusion was staggering.

The retrospective study at Johns Hopkins Hospital found that in 2018, quality reporting for 162 metrics cost the system over $5 million and took 108,478 personnel hours to complete.

In fact, according to JAMA, the hospital spent an estimated $5,038,218.28 in personnel costs plus an additional $602,730.66 in vendor fees that year.

Of the quality metrics studied, a total of 162 unique metrics were identified, of which 96 (59.3%) were claims-based, 107 (66.0%) were outcome metrics, and 101 (62.3%) were related to patient safety, according to the study.

The study also found that claims-based (96 metrics; $37,553.58 per metric per year) and chart-abstracted (26 metrics; $33, 871.30 per metric per year) metrics used the most resources per metric, while electronic metrics consumed far less (4 metrics; $1,901.58 per metric per year).

Johns Hopkins is a large system and the $5 million spent on quality reporting was a small portion of the hospital’s $2 billion in annual expenses that year, but that is not to say these metrics are not costly and time consuming overall.

The authors go on to explain that significant resources are expended exclusively for quality reporting, and some methods of quality assessment are obviously far more expensive than others.

“Claims-based metrics were unexpectedly found to be the most resource intensive of all metric types. Policy makers should consider reducing the number of metrics and shifting to electronic metrics, when possible, to optimize resources spent in the overall pursuit of higher quality,” the study said.

Integrating technology for quality reporting is not new, but it’s no doubt a viable option for hospitals and health systems still looking to streamline reporting and cut costs.