At the American Academy of Ophthalmology meeting in New Orleans in November there was much discussion about the launch of the Iris Registry by the AAO. In spite of the buzz, not many physicians truly understood what the registry represents.
The IRIS registry stands for ‘Intelligent Research In Sight’, and it is a clinical registry designed to integrate with EHR Systems. By selecting particular outcomes, it will allow physicians to participate in government reporting systems such as the PQRS (Physician Quality Reporting System). In addition, the hope is that data extracted from the EHR system can be utilized to comply with other professional requirements such as the American Board of Ophthalmology’s MOC (Maintenance of Certification) part IV performance.
How will this affect your practice? Theoretically it will only improve things for you. Assuming you are working with an electronic health record, your daily activities will continue as usual. However, via a bridge between your EHR and the IRIS registry, certain variables and clinical outcomes will be pulled (in a HIPAA compliant manner) into a de-identifiable database. You will be able to compare your clinical outcomes against those of your colleagues. Furthermore, you will be able to identify gaps that may exist in the way that you care for your patients.
In addition, use of the IRIS registry will satisfy stage 2 meaningful use criteria requiring reporting of data to a specialized registry. As a participant in the IRIS registry, you will be able to run quality reports not only for yourself or your own practice but also nationwide level results.
Can the IRIS registry be used without an EHR system? The short answer is yes, but is not recommended. Besides the time it would take to manually input all the data (data that is already collected by EHR systems), you will still ultimately be penalized by Medicare from not using an EHR system.
With such large amounts of data acquisition, there will likely be many recommended practice patterns that emerge. To this end, the Academy of Ophthalmology will publish benchmarks continually to update all ophthalmologists. While the pricing structure for participation in the IRIS registry has not yet been determined, the first 2,000 registrants will receive complimentary access for two years. For any ophthalmologists considering getting involved, now is certainly the time.