As part of a collaboration with the American College of Rheumatology (ACR) to improve patient care and advance the internal medicine subspecialty of rheumatology, the Section of Rheumatology, Allergy, and Immunology at Yale School of Medicine (YSM) will join the ACR Rheumatology Informatics System for Effectiveness (RISE) national registry.
The ACR states that RISE is “the first and largest electronic-health-record-enabled rheumatology registry in the United States,” helping clinicians and health care providers optimize patient outcomes and make impactful research discoveries.
The effort to connect Yale Rheumatology with RISE has been co-led by Lisa Suter, MD, professor of medicine (rheumatology), director of Quality Measurement Programs at the Center for Outcomes Research and Evaluation (CORE), and co-chair of the Quality Measurement Subcommittee at the ACR, and Eugenia Chock, MD, MPH, assistant professor of medicine (rheumatology).
In joining the RISE registry, Yale Rheumatology will have the opportunity to interface with a national organization that will allow faculty to organize their data effectively, access quality information about their patients, and compare their performance to national benchmarks. Incorporating RISE into the work being done by faculty at YSM will have two primary impacts: higher quality care and unique research opportunities. This work will also be closely aligned with ongoing work by Yale Medicine to create clinical subspecialty dashboards.
“Quality measurement is a big component of the RISE registry, which will help us to educate ourselves about our own practice patterns, to understand our patients, and to search and create reports. I think all clinicians in our section will be excited about that capability,” said Suter. Furthermore, “RISE will not only allow us to leverage the data that we have, but it will allow us to tap into national data and use that from a research standpoint,” she said.
Chock, who conducts research on maternal and child health in rheumatic diseases, said that RISE is a great opportunity for junior faculty like herself who are interested in practice-based research. “My work currently focuses on patient outcomes whereby I need large sets of patient demographic data. RISE will be an important tool because we can look at evolving trends in care, patient outcomes, and best practices,” she said.
The RISE registry offers a robust source of patient data extracted from participating practices across the United States. The registry includes a broad and diverse population of patients with rheumatic diseases and provides details on patient demographics (age, sex, geography), and on clinical characteristics (diagnoses, medications, outcomes).
“I see this as an opportunity to build the clinical research branch within rheumatology, where we’ve been a basic science and translational science powerhouse for decades,” said Suter.
As a director at CORE, Suter has over a decade of experience in developing and implementing quality measures for hospitals, private clinical practices, and other healthcare providers on a national scale. She explains, “The rheumatology world is very heavily influenced by a new payment reform that started about seven years ago. This is part of a movement away from fee-for-service payment, where clinicians are paid for the quantity of healthcare they provide, and towards value-based payment, a more holistic approach in which pay is based on patient outcomes.”
According to Suter, quality measurement is an important step towards value-based payment models, and the RISE registry will be a crucial tool for designing and implementing those measures.
“The advantage of the registry is it allows us to push data out of EPIC, our electronic health record, have it organized in searchable ways, and then be fed back to us. This supports our mission to use practices and protocols that have been proven to create efficient, high-quality, best outcome care, as well as reduce disparities and implicit bias,” said Suter.
The Section of Rheumatology, Allergy and Immunology is dedicated to providing care for patients with rheumatic, allergic and immunologic disorders; educating future generations of thought leaders in the field; and conducting research into fundamental questions of autoimmunity and immunology. To learn more about their work, visit Rheumatology, Allergy & Immunology.