WHAT DO THE US WOUND & PODIATRY REGISTRIES DO?

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) continue to transition physician payments away from volume-based models and toward outcome-based models, and private payors are following suit. Medicare Part B payments (as well as payments from private payors) continue to be linked in large part to the reporting of clinical Quality Measures using your EHR. Transmitting data to the US Wound & Podiatry Registries is another way to be successful under that model.

The US Wound & Podiatry Registries collect Continuity of Care Documents (CCDs) from providers across the country. The data in CCDs, which are extracted from most EHRs and wound care EHRs, will be used to provide you with benchmarking reports that will compare your patient and practice data in comparison with national aggregate data. You can look for outliers in your practice patterns or use of technology, and you can understand the risk level of your patients in comparison to the rest of the country. You can use benchmarking reports for Quality Improvement (QI) activities by identifying which practice patterns might be outside of the norm. You can also use these reports to identify the prevalence rate of certain co-morbid diseases like diabetes in your practice. These data can be used to understand the importance of care in prevention of diabetic lower extremity amputations.

The US Wound and Podiatry Registries are Qualified Clinical Data Registries (QCDRs). We can use Registry data to determine whether practitioners are following evidence-based guidelines for clinical patient care. You can compare yourself with your peers in both quality and patient outcomes. This is important in an era when quality data will be publicly reported by Medicare on websites like Physician Compare using measures that may not be relevant to your specialty. You can access your confidential benchmarking reports via our secure portal. If you identify practice patterns that are outside the norm, you can create Quality Improvement (QI) goals for your practice. Using data reported through our Registry for QI is an Improvement Activity (IA) in MIPS.

Chronic diseases are a significant problem in the US. Physicians care for many patients who struggle to cope with the burden of managing chronic diseases like diabetes, in addition to social, language, and economic barriers. CMS has identified areas of disparities between subgroups of Medicare beneficiaries (e.g., racial and ethnic groups) in health outcomes, utilization, and spending. The US Wound & Podiatry Registries can help you understand whether your practice is caring for patients likely to live in an area where disparities exist. Using our Registry to screen for social determinants of health is another example of an Improvement Activity.