Quality Reporting: A Drain On Practice Resources, New Study Shows | AdvancedMD

Features Navigation

Get Live Chat Get custom pricing Get live demo

← Back

Quality Reporting: A Drain on Practice Resources, New Study Shows

EMR/EHR

If time is money, medical practices are sure losing a lot of both based on the findings in a new study published in Health Affairs. The key take-away, practices spend an average of 785 hours per physician and $15.4 billion per year reporting quality measures to Medicare, Medicaid and private payers.

The study, conducted by researchers from Weill Cornell Medical College, assessed the quality reporting of 1,000 practices, including primary care, cardiology, orthopedic and multi-specialty and the findings are staggering.

Practices reported spending on average 15.1 hours per week per physician on quality measures. Of that 15.1 hours per week, physicians account for 2.6 hours with the rest of the administrative work divided between nurses and medical assistants. About 12 of those 15.1 hours are spent logging data into medical records solely for quality reporting purposes. Additionally, despite a wealth of software tools on the market today, about 80 percent of practices spend more time managing quality measures than they did three years ago and half call it a “significant burden.”

Aside from the major drain on administrative resources, there are heavy financial ramifications for such lengthy and cumbersome reporting as well. The report found practices spend an average of $40,069 per physician for an annual national total of $15.4 billion.

The findings of this study clearly demonstrate the need for greater reporting automation in the healthcare industry. By embracing technology to manage labor-intensive, error-prone and mundane tasks; practices free up their staff to focus on patient care. In the past few years, we have watched electronic medical record (EMR) companies do just that by embracing cloud-based software solutions.

This overwhelming administrative bloat and financial burden can be addressed by implementing software tools and solutions designed to streamline reporting and compliance management. For example, if your practice or organization is still conducting your annual risk analysis through spreadsheets and other manual methods, it is time to embrace automation and a Security Risk Analysis software solution. Designed to control costs, a cloud-based Security Risk Analysis solution automates 78% of the manual labor needed to calculate risk for organizations of all size.

There’s no time like the present to embrace best practices for your quality reporting. Allow technology to do the heavy lifting and free up your resources.


November 17, 2016, Steven Marco of HIPAAOne, as featured in EMR & HIPAA, Powered by HeathScene.


Topic: EMR/EHR, Patient Experience


Other Resources Related to This Topic


EMR/EHR

Mobile EHR Demo

Watch this two-minute demo of our mobile EHR app to learn how you can enjoy...

EMR/EHR

Interoperability Demo

You expect software today to deliver on the promise of successfully transmitting and sharing accurate...

EMR/EHR

Clinical Quality Reporting Demo

Clinical Quality Reporting is unified within our practice management, EHR and patient engagement suite to...

“The money I have invested in AdvancedMD is miniscule compared to the return. I have never been more efficient – ever – in my professional life as I am now.”

Jed Shay, MD
The Pain Care Center

Read the story  ›

“[Our] patients are very well-educated and well-informed, and they want to see results quickly. The practice has to run extremely efficiently and be accessible to them. The nice thing about [AdvancedMD] is it has allowed me to be more efficient both in and out of the office. Now I don’t have to come back into the office, which is great for my family and everything else. It saves me a lot of time – probably an hour a day on the three days I work in the second office.”

Keith Berkowitz, MD
Center for Balanced Health

Read the story  ›
Estaban Lavato, MD - La Loma Medical Center

“The best thing I ever did in private practice was getting AdvancedMD—it has liberated me.”

Estaban Lavato, MD
La Loma Medical Center

“Having integrated practice management and EHR is absolutely wonderful, you don’t have to flip back and forth between systems—all of your information is at hand when needed.”

Raju Raval, MD

Read the story  ›