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  • Using the Power of Data to Advance Patient Care and Ease Reporting

    IRIS Registry
    Mathew W. MacCumber, MD, PhD, presented during the AAO 2017 symposium, “The Value of the IRIS Registry: What Can We Learn From 100 Million Patient Records?” He and a distinguished panel of Academy leaders discussed how the Academy’s IRIS Registry is enabling studies on practice patterns, factors affecting clinical outcomes and possible risk factors for disease development.

    The Academy’s IRIS® Registry (Intelligent Research in Sight) — the nation’s first EHR-based comprehensive eye disease and condition registry — is also the world’s largest clinical data registry. And its reach continues to grow, providing ophthalmologists with clinical benchmarks and practice patterns on more than 44 million U.S. patients and 182 million patient visits. By having the ability to immediately apply the knowledge of millions of data points, we are supporting ophthalmologists in their quest of improving patient outcomes at a quickening pace.

    Promoting New Scientific Discoveries

    Researchers are continuing to mine the IRIS Registry data and shed light on treatment patterns. Recent population-based studies include:

    • How three brands of treatment appear equally effective in patients with a common form of age-related macular degeneration
    • How a potentially blinding complication related to macular degeneration treatment is less common than previously reported
    • How return trips to the OR after macular surgery are frequently linked to worse visual outcomes

    And to support additional studies using IRIS Registry data, Research to Prevent Blindness joined the Academy during AAO 2017 to announce the creation of a new category of grant. This collaboration will fund six studies over two years. Each grant of $35,000 will allow recipients to learn how to use the IRIS Registry’s analytic capabilities and help clinical researchers leverage this growing resource.

    Helping You Succeed During the Reimbursement Transformation

    Nearly 18,000 physicians from over 5,200 practices are currently using IRIS Registry data to assess their quality of care and ease compliance with Medicare reporting requirements. They are rewarded with savings that increase every year by avoiding penalties.

    The IRIS Registry is now ophthalmology’s tool of choice for the Merit-Based Incentive Payment System (MIPS). As with PQRS, the IRIS Registry provides two platforms to help you tackle MIPS — one requires EHRs (integrating your EHR system with the registry) and the other doesn’t (manual data entry via a web portal). For the 2017 reporting year, the IRIS Registry expects to save participants an estimated $100 million — and those practices using an IRIS Registry–integrated EHR realized an almost 100 percent success rate for quality reporting. This is a large increase from the $24 million savings in 2014, when reporting through the IRIS Registry began.

    Read More:

    IRIS Registry Mined for Insights 
    (EyeNet® Magazine)