“This allows users to find out where gaps exist,” says Salahuddin Kazi, MD, chair of the ACR’s Registries and Health Information Technology Committee, which is in charge of RISE. “Sometimes, gaps occur due to improper documentation, not necessarily because a provider is delivering poor quality of care.” When gaps occur, the RISE team will view screenshots of provider notes and templates, and then help them redefine their workflow and documentation so they can meet clinical quality measures.
What’s more, having an EHR that can connect to a registry is a Stage 2 measure of CMS’s Meaningful Use requirement. “All Medicare incentives and penalties are tied to Meaningful Use, so while practitioners want to provide good care and accurate documentation, they also want to make sure that third-party stakeholders and payers are appropriately satisfied,” says Dr. Kazi, who is professor of internal medicine, Division of Rheumatic Diseases and vice chair of education, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas.
Another focus of the committee has been to develop quality measures that are relevant to rheumatologists and provide them with the capability of reporting these measures without creating extra work. The committee can also advise rheumatologists on best practices.
RISE launched in the summer of 2014 and, as of August 2016, has more than 600 users and data on more than 3 million patient encounters involving 653,000 patients. Currently, 663 providers are participating at various stages in the registry. “That’s at least 13% of the ACR’s clinical membership,” Dr. Kazi says. “RISE can connect to more than 80 different EHR vendors, which represents the majority of vendors in the marketplace.”
Karen Appold is a medical writer in Pennsylvania.