viding our members with resources for public health surveillance within their state. “When we were contemplating building the registry, we knew there was a potential to meet some mean- ingful use requirements, definitely PQRS [Physician Quality Reporting System] requirements. But it wasn’t first and foremost; that wasn’t why we were building the registry. We were building this registry to provide data to members to improve the quality of their care.” Successful, established registries
do exist for AAN to emulate as it tests Axon. “Everybody wants to be like cardiol-
ogy and thoracic surgery; they’ve got 20 years on us in terms of putting to- gether their registries,” Ms. Schierman said. “They’re the gold standard that we want to look to.” Ms. Schierman says AAN is using the American Academy of Ophthal-
mology’s (AAO’s) newer Intelligent Research in Sight (IRIS) registry as a guidepost. Garland ophthalmologist John Haley, MD, says IRIS has been a spectacular success for that specialty since launching in March 2014. The chair of the Texas Ophthal- mological Association’s Liaison Com- mittee to Third-Party Payors and Peer Review Agencies says the IRIS regis- try had 12,000 registered practitioners at the end of 2015, with data covering 65 million patient visits. Thirty-six dif- ferent EHR systems map to IRIS, he says, and the process by which the sys- tem extracts data from a physician’s EHR is simple and seamless. For now, IRIS is free for AAO members; fund- ing comes from AAO’s foundation. As a result, Dr. Haley says, meeting
the public health reporting require- ment is easy for ophthalmologists. He says his practice attested to meaning- ful use in 2014 and 2015. “We get exempt from the [other] re-
quirements, and all you have to do is join the IRIS registry, which you want to do anyway because it makes your life easy,” he said.
WOULD A DELAY PAY OFF? Dr. Gilmer says while public health re- porting is a great idea, CMS shouldn’t require it because “it’s not doable, at least, not yet.” He says it takes time to figure out how to navigate a public health agency database or registry and sign up for it. “It is an intricate, com- plicated dozens of hours of time for someone to try to figure this out the first time, if you’re a small practice.” In advocating that CMS delay im- plementing objective 10 until medi- cine is ready, he points to CMS’ imple- mentation of required ICD-10 coding. CMS delayed the ICD-10 implementa- tion date two times until it finally took effect Oct. 1, 2015. “If Medicare had gone through with the switch over to ICD-10 … when
You’re not alone.
You plan to support yourself as you grow older, but sometimes your plans fall short. For 55 years, The Physicians Benevolent Fund (PBF) has been helping TMA physicians and their families ... some have become infirm, others have had an accident, some have outlived their financial resources.
PBF assists Texas physicians and their families — call today.
We know it’s hard to ask for help, but you don’t have to go it alone.
Call TMA at (800) 880-1300, ext. 1602, or email
chris.johnson@
texmed.org
54 TEXAS MEDICINE May 2016
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