Chicago—In 2026, the ACR will launch a new RISE Registry that should be a much better quality improvement platform than its predecessor RISE Registry, which has been in operation since 2014. Instead of focusing solely on quality improvement measures mandated by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) for the MACRA program, the new RISE Registry will allow members to access nearly 30 quality measures through a modern data framework. Along with supporting quality improvement, the new RISE will encourage rheumatologists to share their data in a feedback loop, creating a learning environment in which rheumatology practices and providers can improve their quality of care.
In an ACR Convergence 2025 session titled RISE Rollout: New Features, What to Expect and Future Directions with the New Platform, Tom Tack, senior director of the ACR; David Voccola of IQVIA, Patients Insights Experience & Registries; and Christie Bartels, MD, MS, division head and professor of rheumatology at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and ACR RHIT chair, spoke on what ACR members can expect from the new registry and why it is important to join.
Why a New Registry?
Mr. Tack said the RISE update is not simply a facelift, but a transformation from a quality reporting tool to a full-on productivity tool that expands quality improvement beyond the traditional Merit-based Incentive Payment (MIPS)-MVP focus. With feedback from key stakeholders, he said the ACR decided to completely rethink RISE to evolve it from just a traditional Qualified Clinical Data Registry reporting tool into a clinical productivity tool. The ACR’s research highlighted several advancements, including improvements in technology, that showed the limitations of the current registry. He emphasized that CMS specialty-level quality reporting will only increase over time, and the new RISE will be a platform, tool and instrument that can help practices and providers reach their quality goals. A main aim of the registry, he said, is to help support rheumatology becoming a data-driven specialty.
The registry is open to all ACR members, and it has value for each type of rheumatologic practice. For community-based providers, Mr. Tack called RISE a “modern, intuitive, comprehensive and proactive quality improvement management resource that allows you to assess your quality improvement efforts, over time, on all rheumatology-specific and other quality measures [including experimental, draft and test measures].” He also said the new registry allows a simple and easy way to report performance measures to CMS, and underscored how simple it is to register. “Once set up, RISE is highly automated, requiring virtually no administrative or IT time or resources,” he said.
For academic health centers or multi-specialty groups, the new RISE simplifies connectivity to EPIC and Cerner/Oracle electronic health records (EHRs), and provides opportunity for rheumatology-specific specialty quality reporting versus ACO reporting. “RISE enables you to know within 30 seconds if you are on track or should consider reviewing your current quality performance,” he said, adding that the new Analytics Dashboard can offer insights and includes longitudinal, comparator and detailed views of your data across your department, among other providers and peers, and other benchmarks. “In the future, RISE is expected to provide Centers of Excellence certification opportunities,” Mr. Tack added.
For researchers, the new registry will contain patient-level clinical data on more than 4 million patients and more than 41 million patient encounters. Basically, it will include data on virtually every rheumatic disease, including rare ones. “The RISE database is now a research-caliber database and will soon be tokenized, allowing RISE to be linked with other tokenized data sets to provide comprehensive patient-journey insights,” he said.
According to Dr. Bartels, additional benefits include the ability to create and validate new quality measures and other grant activities, such as the CDC lupus grant work. She also said the new RISE gives large health systems new specialty reporting options, which is important given that each ACO cycle increases the challenges to save beyond the prior period. In addition, she said RISE participation will be a way to benchmark large systems for recognition programs for disease-specific and overall centers of excellence.
“The new chapter of RISE will allow the ACR to lead the way into being a learning health specialty that delivers on the ACR promise to help providers so they can help their patients,” she said.
It’s About Connectivity
Mr. Voccola provided more details on the design and ease of use of the new registry. He said the RISE onboarding experience is quick, needing only the Taxpayer Identification Number (TIN) for your organization, an authorized signer for your organization and an EHR vendor name and software version. For each participating clinician, an NPI, email address and ACR member ID is needed.
Once you get through the front door, he said, the Quality Measures dashboard will light up with new EHR data in two ways. First, if your practice uses, for example, NextGen, the new registry can pre-integrate with the EHR and, once the practice joins, all data automatically goes into RISE. He said it takes IQVIA about 8 hours to get a practice connected and identifying a roster of patients to share in the registry.
Second, the new registry replaces static tables with modern clinician-centric visualizations designed to improve both at-a-glance and detailed views of your performance. Each onscreen component prioritizes the most actionable information so a provider can quickly know whether attention is warranted. For example, if you want just a glance at your current quality performance measure, it takes about 30 seconds to see if you are on track or should consider reviewing it. If you want to scan measure details to see what is trending up or down, it takes 60 seconds, and if you want to review the measure in detail to see what its impact is, how it is affecting your score and if any guidance is needed, that takes about 120 seconds.
“When you have more than 2 minutes, you can drill down more for insight across multiple dimensions of care,” Mr. Voccola said. This basically moves the needle from just insight into quality measures and performance to actually taking action. For instance, you will now be able to look across a measure, activity type or patient type and see where the difficulty lies if your quality measure is not as good as you want it to be.
Ultimately, the aim of the new registry is to generate better connectivity both within practices and institutions and among them. “We want to get to the place of not just sharing data but developing a feedback loop from what is happening in practices to make this a learning environment,” Mr. Voccola said.
He also said Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) is the number one health data standard used to represent and transfer EHR data, and will likely remain the champion in health care data. “RISE and FHIR leverage EHR interoperability to reduce burden and increase quality,” he said.
In other words, rheumatologists get feedback on quality measures and also provide data on their quality measures to act as a feedback loop so the entire specialty benefits.
Mary Beth Nierengarten is a freelance medical journalist based in Minneapolis.
