The American College of Rheumatology has launched a new clinical registry that allows rheumatologists to more seamlessly report on quality, while also collecting real-world data that could help researchers fill in the gaps on rare diseases, such as lupus.
“By everyone participating in a process by which they get information, a rising tide will lift all boats. Everybody will get better care,” said Dr. Salahuddin Kazi, a rheumatologist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas and chair of the ACR’s Registries and Health Information Technology Committee. “We will have a treasure trove of information that will be hypothesis generating.”
The Rheumatology Informatics System for Effectiveness ( RISE ) Registry is currently available for free to all members of the ACR. The organization has partnered with the health information technology vendor FigMD to build a system that when paired with a practice’s electronic health record (EHR), collects quality data on all patients and sends the de-identified data to the RISE Registry.
The RISE Registry could be a big help to rheumatologists facing multiple reporting requirements from the government and certifying bodies, Dr. Kazi said. The registry has already been recognized by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services as a Qualified Clinical Data Registry. That means physicians can satisfy their reporting requirements to the Physician Quality Reporting System program by contributing data to the RISE Registry. The new ACR registry also meets meaningful use requirements for the Medicare and Medicaid EHR Incentive Programs .
RISE doesn’t just collect data from practices; it also feeds the data back to a dashboard on the practice’s EHR. Rheumatologists can use that dashboard to generate reports that compare their practice’s performance on quality measures to that of their peers. Or it can aid in chronic disease management. For example, physicians can generate a report on how many 65-year-old women in their practice were not screened for osteoporosis.
The RISE reports can also help rheumatologists complete the practice improvement modules required for Maintenance of Certification, Dr. Kazi said.
“The whole principle is enter data once and use it many times,” he said.
This isn’t the ACR’s first foray into clinical registries. In 2009, the ACR launched the Rheumatology Clinical Registry or RCR , allowing physicians to report on quality measures to Medicare. But the system required physicians to manually enter their data, and the data collected were limited to a small number of quality measures.
“We really felt that to truly measure quality and to truly create a learning health care system where you are able to reflect on the care you are providing, that you need a sample size of 100%,” Dr. Kazi said.
The RISE Registry looks to achieve that goal without requiring physicians to manually enter their data. The RCR will remain available, Dr. Kazi said, but for practices with an EHR, the RISE Registry offers more benefits, without the data entry.
The RISE Registry is live now in a “beta testing” phase, Dr. Kazi said. About 50 practices are participating, but so far only a few have gone through the full process. While there’s no data entry involved, practices do need to perform some up-front work to get started, including training from the ACR on how to use the system and signing user agreements that ensure compliance with HIPAA. The vendor also needs to install software that allows the registry to access the practice’s data.
As more rheumatologists add their data to the RISE Registry, ACR officials are hopeful that it can be used for more than quality reporting and improvement. They also see it as a research tool that could provide information that is hard to glean from small, tightly controlled clinical trials.
“We will start to see signals at a low level that are missed in small, 300- or 500-patient studies even if you followed them for 10 years,” Dr. Kazi said. “When we get to that 500,000-patient mark, we will start to find information, and I think this will be very good for research.”
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