NEW YORK—Many medical professions are adopting clinical registries. With an increasing emphasis on registries in meaningful use and other quality-driven initiatives, registries are part of the new health care landscape.
The American Optometric Association’s (AOA) MORE (Measures and Outcomes Registry for Eyecare) launched about one year ago and many optometrists have been signing up, as the organization encourages all optometrists to take part. AOA MORE is designed to serve as a secure, private database that integrates data from doctors’ EHRs to help report necessary Medicare data to obtain increased payments and avoid penalties, help with clinical improvement through self-benchmarking, support increased access and scope of care and analyze population information.
AOA MORE will integrate the data from doctors’ EHR systems to provide a systematic way of collecting patient data that helps enhance outcomes, procedures and standards of practice. Major EHR systems companies have committed to providing anonymous patient diagnosis, disease and outcome information to the registry.
Just this past spring, AOA MORE, powered by Prometheus Research, earned crucial Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) distinction, AOA's newest member benefit delivers a quality measures reporting tool that saves users immeasurable time and money. The program received CMS approval as a Qualified Clinical Data Registry (QCDR) for the 2016 Physician Quality Reporting System (PQRS) reporting year. This important recognition places AOA MORE in the same category as other medical professions' clinical data registries.
Jeffrey Michaels, OD, AOA Quality Improvement & Registries Committee chair, pointed out that this CMS acknowledgement is a great accomplishment for AOA—one that ensures members will be able to participate in quality initiatives for PQRS and future quality reporting initiatives. "Doctors of optometry—who have EHR systems integrated into AOA MORE—can simplify their lives by registering for our QCDR and allowing it to process their PQRS measures," Dr. Michaels said. He added, "QCDR covers quality measures across multiple payers and is not limited to Medicare. We are seeing commercial medical insurance strive for quality-driven payments, and this registry will seat our members at the center of that paradigm change."
The QCDR designation means AOA MORE will seamlessly integrate data from users' EHR and submit that 2016 PQRS data to CMS on doctors' behalf. By doing so, doctors will no longer have to report additional "claims-based" codes or be forced to report measures that may not be applicable to their practice based on EHR limitations. As long as doctors properly document in their EHR, AOA MORE is programmed to appropriately report PQRS measures.
Users will be required to formally "agree to submit" this data to PQRS when it's time to do so—for 2016, this occurs during the first 60 days of 2017—and AOA MORE will notify doctors of this deadline. It should be noted that if the EHR system a doctor uses is not yet integrated with AOA MORE, other methods of reporting should be used to avoid any future payment penalties. Doctors can use EHR-based reporting, claims-based reporting, qualified registry reporting or one of the Group Practice Reporting Options to meet the CMS PQRS reporting requirements.
Medicare is emphasizing registry use in its new payment model that begins for doctors of optometry in 2019, emphasizing meaningful use, PQRS, using a registry and costs of providing care, said Dr. Michaels. Therefore, using AOA MORE will allow doctors of optometry to more easily participate in that new payment model going forward.
There is a Feb. 29, 2016, enrollment deadline to demonstrate "active engagement" in a specialized data registry for the 2016 EHR Incentive Program year, more than 6,500 active AOA-member doctors enrolled with AOA MORE—more than half the number of physicians currently enrolled in the American Academy of Ophthalmology's IRIS (Intelligent Research in Sight) Registry, which launched in 2014, in less than half the time.
As of March 2, more than 6,500 AOA-member doctors had signed up for MORE and the registry was a focal point at the recent Optometry’s Meeting at the end of June in Boston.
Vision Monday examined the growth of health care and eyecare professional registries in a special cover story in February 2015, when many were even first formed and VMail reported on AOA MORE when its name was selected in March 2015.
For more information about the registry, FAQs, detailed info and a video about AOA MORE is posted here.