Healthcare Registries can guide your clinical decision making by providing you with “real-time” clinical outcome analytics. The analytics are designed to look at practical issues affecting the quality of care you deliver to your patients. These issues impact the efficiency and viability of your practice. There are various types of registries which can be used in different ways. Some registries are known as “Reporting Registries” which are designed to report merit-based incentive payment systems (MIPS) scores. In comparison, Healthcare Registries is a “Clinical Outcome Registry” that creates clinical outcome analytics. Most areas of Medicine have been utilizing registries for many years, one example is the American College of Cardiology’s National Cardiovascular Data Registry.
It is important for you to understand the difference between clinical outcome analytics and studies. Studies, which take months and months of research, have been used to collect evidence-based data to establish the guidelines for best practices. “Real-time” clinical outcome analytics use evidence-based care guidelines as the starting point to measure the effectiveness of the implementation of the guidelines to understand and measure the specific change in patient outcomes.
Think of clinical outcome analytics as a way of sharing clinical experience. Evidence-based care guidelines recommend procedures to be included in the care delivery. It does not inform you how to include those steps or how to implement them, so different providers and different organizations will implement them in different ways. Without outcome analytics, a provider only knows the results of how he or she, or a very narrow close group of providers performed. Healthcare Registries, tracks the difference in performance throughout the user base, creating outcome analytics data visible to every participating provider. The result is that each provider has visibility into the effect of processes from other providers, processes in which he or she did not directly participate.
Let’s use as an example, the recently completed guidelines for the management of age-related macular degeneration. These guidelines review all of the evidence-based studies that support the effectiveness of the Mediterranean diet in reducing the risk of developing macular degeneration. The guideline suggests recommending to these patients that they adopt the Mediterranean diet. HealthCare Registries is developing two levels of initial analytics that support providers utilizing this guideline.
The first level is a simple process measure analytic. Here are some of the ways that a provider could incorporate his recommendation to a patient to adopt the Mediterranean diet:
· The provider might simply make the suggestion
· The provider might recommend a list of books or publications
· The provider might refer the patient to a local organization that will help them follow the Mediterranean diet
· The provider might refer the patient to a local organization that provides cooking classes
If as a provider, you simply make the suggestion to the patient without any other support steps, how effective is that approach compared to any of the other approaches in getting patients to actually adopt the diet? As a provider, I simply do not know. My clinical experience shows me only how the approach I adopted works. On the other hand, the registry will track how many patients adopt the diet for each of the approaches that provider employs, and make those results available to all. The registry provides the provider with comparison data and visibility into results that practitioner may not have even thought of. The provider then uses the analytics to decide if there is a more effective way to encourage patients.
The next level of analytics is to actually measure the change in conversion rate to the various levels of macular degeneration in patients that have adopted the diet compared to those that have not, in various categories. This data will allow providers to take a population management approach to improving outcomes. Future analytic may be useful to compare the rate of progression of early AMD changes between patients using an AREDS formula supplement with patients that are on an AREDS formula supplement and the Mediterranean diet.
A scientific study looks at the effectiveness of reducing AMD while on an AREDS formulation. A clinical outcomes registry, such as Healthcare Registries, looks at how effectively the guideline is implemented. Outcome analytics will help guide your decisions on how to implement the evidence- based recommendations. In addition, outcome analytics can go past the evidence-based information and study combined therapy approaches that weren’t considered in the scientific study. This will provide valuable clinical information for you to use in your prescribing and decision making.
Healthcare Registries utilizes robust analytics to support scientific studies for organizations that want to conduct post-FDA approval studies or any other scientific study format. The ability to automatically extract “real-time” data from EHR systems as well as the ability to congregate data from multiple sources makes Healthcare Registries an ideal solution for these types of analytics.