IR Quarterly Fall 2018
IR Quarterly Fall 2018
September 1, 2018
Presented with an opportunity to improve patient outcomes, differentiate your practice, meet MACRA requirements and contribute to the future of interventional radiology, would you take it? If you answered, “yes,” you’re in luck. This opportunity is, in fact, available to all interventional radiologists via participation in National IR Quality Registry. The National IR Quality Registry, a joint effort of the Society of Interventional Radiology (SIR) and the American College of Radiology (ACR), is enrolling now. Participation is simple, and the benefits are significant.
“We are participating in the IR Registry through HI-IQ because we are committed to providing our patients with evidence based, quality care. With the feedback and reports from HI-IQ and the IR registry we are able to continuously review patient safety and quality measures.” Cathy Zinck RN BSN Clinical Data Coordinator Melrose Wakefield Hospital Cardiac and Endovascular Department |
The IR Registry enables the collection of performance measures for image-guided interventional procedures, and participating facilities and physicians receive reports based on aggregated benchmarks to facilitate patient safety and quality improvement efforts. In addition, the IR registry provides participants with additional opportunities to fulfill CMS Physician Quality Reporting System reporting requirements, and gain maintenance of certification credit from the American Board of Radiology.
Participation in the IR Registry is one of the easiest ways you can get involved in a major SIR initiative, and takes minimal effort. Through the use of standardize report templates within your dictation system or via the use of approved data collection tools such as HI-IQ®, procedure data is captured during the standard radiology workflow and submitted automatically to the Registry. This procedure data is then used by the ACR to produce quality reports illustrating local and aggregate performance for the Registry’s quality measures. Each facility’s quality reports are available to them through the ACR’s National Radiology Data Registry Portal.
"Just because someone says they are good, does not necessarily translate in an environment of metric-based data analysis. With HI-IQ, not only can we show our overall complication rates collectively as a group, we can compare ourselves to the national benchmarks. This is much more powerful knowledge to patients as well as administrators. Even better yet, the data is at our fingertips with access from our mobile devices!” Anthony Eclavea, MD of Radiology Associates of Appleton |
Carle Foundation Hospital in Urbana, IL has opted to use HI-IQ to collect and submit data to the registry due to internal, hospital IT restrictions which didn’t allow for the use of standardized report template data collection. Julie Cundiff, RN BSN, Vascular Database Coordinator for Carle Foundation Hospital, has been responsible for registry data collection since April 2018 and comments, “I love to use HI-IQ, it is very user friendly and can be modified to help gather the data points your facility is looking for. The way HI-IQ has the collection tool set up makes it quick and easy to input the data.”
Whichever submission method is used, the benefits of participation are clear. The IR Registry is the first wide-scale, comprehensive data collection effort to evaluate and facilitate improvement of interventional radiology procedures. IR practices will likely be quick to recognize the competitive advantages that can be obtained by participating, both at the local practice level and as a national specialty. Anthony Eclavea, MD of Radiology Associates of Appleton describes the impact to his practice, “As part of an ACO, we don’t need to participate in the Registry for collection of Merit Based Incentive Payment data, but nevertheless, we see participation as essential to our future. The quality measure data provided to us as a result of participation has clear implications on our ability to market our practice to patients and differentiate ourselves against other radiology practices and competing specialists.”
Visit www.SIRweb.org to learn more and to enroll.
About HI-IQ
HI-IQ was designed by volunteers from the Society of Interventional Radiology (SIR) and provides solutions for a diverse range of interventional radiology needs. First developed in 1993 as a means of capturing QA data, HI-IQ has evolved into the centerpiece tool for managing IR workflow. Today HI-IQ is solely marketed and developed by ConexSys Inc., the healthcare division of Custom Computer Specialists, under the exclusive advisory guidance of the Society of Interventional Radiology.