Advancing Patient Care 1 Million Visits at a Time
Database registry manager Andy Khuong demonstrates the IRIS Registry’s innovative analytics module. Guests at the AAO 2016 event, “Using the IRIS Registry: Access, Analyze, Act,” learned how to get valuable clinical insights into their patient populations.
The Academy’s quality-of-care initiative reached a significant milestone in 2016.
Our IRIS® Registry (Intelligent Research in Sight)—the nation's first EHR-based comprehensive eye disease and condition registry—is now the world’s largest clinical database. And its reach continues to grow, providing ophthalmologists with clinical benchmarks and practice patterns on more than 32 million U.S. patients and 119 million patient visits as of Dec. 31, 2016.
Since the beginning of 2014, ophthalmologists using the IRIS Registry have submitted data on millions of patients with common eye diseases, including open-angle glaucoma, cataracts, age-related macular degeneration and diabetic retinopathy. These electronic records allow for data collation in a fraction of the time it would have taken 10 years ago.
Approximately 14,000 physicians now use this data to assess their quality of care and ease compliance with Medicare reporting requirements. For the 2014 reporting year, ophthalmologists avoided more than $24 million in penalties by using the IRIS Registry to participate in the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ Physician Quality Reporting System. As CMS transitions to its new physician payment system in 2017, the Academy will evolve the IRIS Registry’s reporting functions to meet the agency’s requirements.
Expanding the power of data science
IRIS Registry users span all practice types, from solo practitioners to large institutions, including 15 academic teaching hospitals. The registry’s influence continues to expand rapidly. Alongside other sources of data, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is now evaluating use of the IRIS Registry to establish a new eye health surveillance system that would provide population estimates of vision loss, eye diseases, eye health disparities and barriers and facilitators to care.
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