JAMA : the journal of the American Medical Association
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US hospitals report data on many health care quality metrics to government and independent health care rating organizations, but the annual cost to acute care hospitals of measuring and reporting quality metric data, independent of resources spent on quality interventions, is not well known. ⋯ Significant resources are expended exclusively for quality reporting, and some methods of quality assessment are 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.