The registry will be a constantly developing entity, with new measures added as they are needed. The Academy has also formed clinical advisory committees in seven subspecialties to consider the need for new measures. These committees are made up of experts from Academy committees, specialty societies, and stakeholder groups and are chaired by a Regent executive committee member who has a five-year term, said Lisa Ishii, MD, a member of the Regent executive committee and associate professor of otolaryngology-head and neck surgery at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore.
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November 2016New measures for Regent will be developed in much the same way that new clinical practice guidelines are currently developed by the Academy. A development group will consider a request for a new measure from the clinical advisory committee and then will have the option to put together a panel to develop that measure.
Dr. Ishii said that clinical data registries will become even more critical going forward. “It is assumed that the future of safe surgery is for surgical subspecialties to be reporting the data through clinical data registries,” she said. “It is assumed that to participate as a safe surgeon in a house of surgery you will have some relation to a clinical data registry.”
Regent will store clinical data such as patient demographics, implants, procedures, and performance measures, but not administrative billing data, said Dr. Ishii. This will make the registry a powerful tool for research, she added, pointing to the Society for Thoracic Surgeons, which has had a clinical data registry since the 1980s. “They publish more than 100 research papers using data from their registry every single year,” she said. “So that’s how they’re defining their practice.”
Tim Parr, the vice president of technology for FIGmd, touched on the many changes in information technology that have allowed registries such as Regent to take shape. Registries have evolved from manual entry to automated systems and from providing limited data to the availability of complete clinical records for large numbers of patients.
Why Participate?
The process of adding data to the registry is not time consuming for users. Once Regent participants enter data into their electronic health records, just as they do now, they have nothing more to do. “This passive data collection and central data analysis enables us to do much more than we could have in the past,” said Parr. He added that the registry will be nimble enough to adapt to new regulatory requirements that might be imposed down the line.
One main goal of the registry is to be the definers of quality for our specialty, rather than to have insurance dictate it. With the data and information we can get from a registry we can actually influence that greatly. —Jim Denneny, MD
Louise Eddy, MS, an audiologist and executive director of Texas Ear, Nose and Throat Specialists in Houston, said the process of joining the registry was “incredibly simple.” You sign up, sign the agreement, and take part in a kick-off meeting by phone; Regent then sends the requirements on how to connect to the system, she said. Everything after that is handled by Regent.