Quality reporting efforts take their toll in time and money, according to a report published in Health Affairs.

Medical practices spend an average of 785 hours per physician and $15.4 billion per year reporting quality measures to Medicare, Medicaid and private payers, according to the new report.

The study, led by researchers from Weill Cornell Medical College, looked at the quality reporting efforts of 1,000 practices from the MGMA membership, including primary care, cardiology, orthopedic and multi-specialty.

"Much is to be gained from quality measurement, [but] the current system is unnecessarily costly, and greater effort is needed to standardize measures and make them easier to report," the authors, led by Lawrence P. Casalino, MD, PhD, wrote.

Practices reported spending 15.1 hours per week per physician on quality measures--2.6 hours each week for physicians, with the rest of the work going to nurses or medical assistants. About 12 of those hours were spent logging data into medical records solely for quality reporting.

About 80 percent of practices said they spend more time managing quality measures than they did three years ago. Almost half called that a significant burden but 27 percent said the measures correlated with quality care. The report also found practices spent $40,069 per physician each year on quality reporting for an annual total of $15.4 billion.

"The cost to physician practices of dealing with quality measures is high and rising," the researchers said.

"On top of the obscene waste of billions of dollars each year on quality measures, the most alarming thing about this study of MGMA member practices is that nearly three-fourths of the groups reported being measured on quality measures that are not clinically relevant," said Halee Fischer-Wright, MGMA's president and CEO, in a statement.

"The vast majority also stated current measures are useless for improving patient care. This study proves that the current top-down approach has failed. It serves no purpose to have over 3,000 competing measures of quality across government and private initiatives."

The federal government is the largest contributor to the problem, Fischer-Wright said, and "needs to get out of the business of dictating patient care through wasteful mandates and create simplified systems to support medical practices in improving quality across the country."