Benefits of Participation

With the IRIS^® Registry, ophthalmologists can compare their patient outcomes, professional performance and care processes against other ophthalmologists across the country. The IRIS Registry will be able to measure the continuum of care from initial patient contact, through intervention and follow up.

• Improve patient care — Monitor patient interactions, track interventions, identify and address gaps in quality of care and measure patient outcomes. You can even complete an improvement project that counts toward requirements for maintenance of certification and the Merit-Based Incentive Payment System (MIPS).
• Manage patient populations — Proactively manage clinical conditions for entire patient populations by running reports on specific care criteria.
• Benchmark your practice — Identify practice strengths and weaknesses using the IRIS Registry's ophthalmology-specific clinical data from other practices to compare to the performance and outcomes data of your practice.
  • Run quality reports on demand, providing clinician- and practice-level results, plus national results and patient-level detail for all IRIS Registry measures.
  • Compare yourself to a national pool of more than 16,000 participating ophthalmologists and their clinicians.
• Enhance quality and practice efficiency — Use the IRIS^® Registry data to analyze practice processes and procedures and make fact-based decisions. Evaluate your performance on 26 subspecialty outcome and high priority measures available only in the IRIS Registry.*
• Join a community of quality — Become a member of a like-minded community of quality-driven professionals striving to continuously improve patient care. Interact with your peers to create opportunities for sharing quality improvement strategies and broaden your professional network.

*Measure data can be electronically extracted as long as your electronic health records (EHR) system has the subspecialty fields of interest for measurement.

Streamline Quality Reporting

As a certified EHR Technology vendor, the IRIS Registry eases the burden of reporting to the federal Merit-Based Incentive Payment System (MIPS).

• Save time: The IRIS Registry automates extraction of EHR data, reducing work for the participating physician or practice.
• Avoid penalties: Physicians who participate in the IRIS Registry can use it to avoid the 9% MIPS penalty on Medicare fee-for-service payments.
• Become eligible for a small bonus: For those using an EHR system certified for the MIPS program, you can report the quality, promoting interoperability and improvement activity components through the IRIS Registry. Additionally, EHR-integrated IRIS Registry users can attest to the Clinical Data Registry Reporting measure under the promoting interoperability category as well as several QCDR specific improvement activities under the improvement activities category. Fully participating in MIPS qualifies physicians to be eligible for a small bonus.

Long-Term Benefits

Aggregate data is used by the Academy to identify topics and practice areas around which CME activities could be developed in the future.

In addition, the data entered by ophthalmology practices nationwide – when taken in aggregate — will support the Academy's advocacy effort to establish fair valuation for ophthalmic services. Medical societies with patient registries have discovered the tremendous power behind data-driven arguments on the advocacy front.

Learn more about the IRIS Registry.

"Happy Birthday to the IRIS Registry," former CEO David W. Parke II, MD, talks about the IRIS Registry in the Academy's EyeNet^® Magazine.

What Physicians Are Saying About the IRIS Registry

Clifford W. Brooks III, MD

Conner Smith Eye Center, Indiana

The IRIS^® Registry is helping us use our EHR system to its full potential. It has specifically allowed us to better track important metrics regarding how well we follow our patients with chronic diseases such as diabetes, glaucoma, and age-related macular degeneration. Having the data meaningfully extracted directly from our EHR has been a substantial time-saver and allows us to drill down and identify specific patients whose record indicates an action item.

Having this information in the context of a specialty-specific registry is of particular value to me, as I can quickly compare my data with that of my peers across the country, and I can identify gaps, trends, and more.

Having the data at my fingertips allows me to share it with the other team members at my office. I can quickly relay items that we need to work on, such as firming up our “close the loop” protocols for referrals and for communication with primary care providers, particularly for patients who need ongoing care and management of diabetes and diabetic retinopathy.

Improved communication between physicians in my experience trickles down to better patient compliance. Patients know that we are sharing information from each eye exam back to their primary care provider.

It’s also exciting to know that data from my personal practice patterns are already being used to advance knowledge and public health through research of IRIS Registry data.