Yale Rheumatology Joins Qualified Clinical Data Registry

The Section of Rheumatology, Allergy & Immunology at Yale School of Medicine announced it would join the Rheumatology Informatics System for Effectiveness (RISE), a qualified clinical data registry. 

RISE is the first EHR-enabled rheumatology registry in the United States holding nearly 2.4 million patient data records. The system aims to help clinicians and healthcare providers optimize patient outcomes and make impactful research discoveries, RISE stated.

By joining RISE, Yale Rheumatology will be able to organize its data effectively, access quality information about patients, and compare Yale’s performance to national benchmarks.

Additionally, clinicians can leverage the RISE dashboard to track performance down to the individual patient level, the press release stated.

“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,” Lisa Suter, MD, professor of medicine (rheumatology) and director of Quality Measurement Programs at the Center for Outcomes Research and Evaluation (CORE), said in the press release.

“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,” said Suter, who is also a co-chair of the Quality Measurement Subcommittee at the American College of Rheumatology (ACR).

The qualified clinical data registry offers unique research opportunities with a rich source of information on people with rheumatic disease across the United States. RISE contains details on patient demographics such as age, sex, geography, and clinical characteristics like diagnoses, medications, and 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.

RISE is a great opportunity for faculty interested in practice-based research, explained Eugenia Chock, who conducts research on maternal and child health in rheumatic diseases.

“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,” noted Chock, MD, MPH, assistant professor of medicine (rheumatology).

Quality measurements are essential for value-based payment models that focus on patient outcomes and care quality. The RISE registry will also be a helpful tool for designing and implementing those measures, Suter explained.

“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,” Suter said. “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.”