Eyeworld

EW NEWS & OPINION 26 April 2017 by Liz Hillman EyeWorld Staff Writer "Every individual physician in IRIS owns his or her individual data. The Academy has the deidentified, aggregated data so that each individ- ual physician can actually go on a personal computer, and start to look an analyze their own data compared with national norms," Dr. Parke explained. But as the registry grew and evolved in the last 3 years, not just individual members, but also research groups, large practices, and other subspecialty societies have shown an interest in the analysis of registry data to advance science. "We absolutely support that. To me it would be a huge tragedy if that data is not analyzed and we don't learn from it," Dr. Parke said. Dr. Parke described IRIS as a vehicle for scientific advancement, providing the opportunity to learn more about the natural history of disease, the effect of various treat- ments, the ability to look at huge populations of data and risk adjust, and to look at comorbidities. "We ophthalmologists are data-driven people.…We respond to data, and none of us went to med- ical school to be average, so when we see a tool that can help us really understand what we're doing, know what are outcomes are, and poten- tially improve those outcomes, we have proven that we leaped at it," he continued. Access to the registry and its broader data is currently included with AAO membership. Those inter- ested simply have to sign an agree- ment to allow access with their EHR. From there, Dr. Parke said minimal practice staff time is required to map IRIS to the practice's EHR. "In other words, we need to know what field number visual acui- ty right eye lives in. Then everything happens seamlessly at night as an automatic upload," he said. From a privacy standpoint, Dr. Parke said the registry has the same protection as hospital peer-review processes, so there has never been a case of anyone being able to go in for legal reasons and access data. "We are mapped to 43 different electronic health records [EHR], and here's something that should blow your mind—it still blows mine—we have to date over 122 million pa- tient encounters in the registry from nearly 33 million unique patients," Dr. Parke said. Diving into some more specific numbers collected by IRIS, as of June 2016, the registry had data on more than 3.7 million cataract surgeries and nearly 3.3 mil- lion with a diagnosis of glaucoma. "These are huge numbers to be able to risk adjust and analyze and come out with information which simply because of the size of the database, is clinically relevant," Dr. Parke said. When the registry was first conceived of and started, its primary purpose, which remains today, was to give individual ophthalmologists the opportunity to see what they're really doing in practice, not just what they think they're doing, but provide hard numbers and analysis, Dr. Parke said. AAO's IRIS Registry expands its uses, sees massive adoption in 3 years since launch I t's been 3 years since the Amer- ican Academy of Ophthalmol- ogy (AAO) officially launched its IRIS (Intelligent Research in Sight) Registry, with the goal of it being a tool to help facilitate qual- ity improvement at the individual physician level. Since then IRIS has expanded its uses and applicability and, perhaps most impressively, has become not only the largest clinical ophthal- mology database in the world but the biggest single medical specialty clinical data registry of any type in the world. Eighty-five percent of practicing ophthalmologists in the United States are on IRIS or are in the process of having their electron- ic health reporting system mapped so they can get on, AAO CEO David W. Parke, II, MD, San Francisco, said. Update on ophthalmology's largest clinical database A screenshot from the IRIS Registry dashboard Source: David Parke, MD

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