The ACR is committed to helping you and your practice find an electronic registry system that will support population management and quality improvement while meeting increasing reporting demands for external quality and pay-for-performance programs. To provide for these activities, the ACR has developed the Rheumatology Clinical Registry (RCR), an electronic registry system designed to help you organize and maximize information. The RCR was developed by rheumatologists to meet the specific requirements of and support the unique needs of ACR members.
The RCR launched in the spring of 2009. The first release allowed users to enter and store patient data using direct upload or manual data entry via ACR-developed patient registration and encounter forms. The current version of the RCR supports documentation and reporting for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Physician Quality Reporting Initiative (PQRI) and American Board of Medicine maintenance of certification, provides practice/provider benchmarking reports, and helps support the practice of evidence-based medicine at the point of care. A portal for direct patient data entry into the RCR is in development and is expected to go live in the coming months.
The RCR provides a single system to support local registry/disease management functions, as well as data aggregation, analysis, and reporting in a national program. As the ACR moves forward in the development process, the RCR is being designed to seamlessly extract key data to provide you with an easy-to-use tool that works in parallel with your existing systems and fulfills local needs.
The ACR is also working to develop rheumatology-specific data standards that focus on the capture, storage, and extraction of information in electronic systems to address interoperability needs as they exist now. This effort relates to the analysis of static data, with an eye toward the future and real-time technologies.
In order to make the RCR a tool that meets the needs of its users, the ACR looks to its members for guidance on next steps. Are you a current RCR user? If so, the ACR’s registry, quality, and healthcare informatics department wants to hear from you about your experience and how we can make the tool more useful for you. We’d also like your ideas about future development of the RCR, including functionality that will streamline patient/population care management and quality efforts in your practice. Please send your comments and suggestions to Itara Barnes at [email protected].