Background/Purpose: The American College of Rheumatology’s Rheumatology Informatics System for Effectiveness (RISE) web-based clinician dashboard enables quality performance monitoring and reporting in the Merit-Based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) for participating practices. Despite substantial investment in the dashboard, whether it facilitates improvements in quality of care is unknown. We investigated the relationship between levels of engagement with the RISE dashboard and performance on 8 rheumatology-specific measures between 2020-2022.

Methods: We classified practices with ≥ 1 user with access to the dashboard for ≥ 6 months into 4 levels of engagement using RISE dashboard audit log data based on breadth and depth of use during each year (Table 1). Engagement categories were defined as: most (≥2 sessions/month & ≥1 measure-action/month for ≥ 6 months), moderate (some session & measure-actions but did not meet the most engaged criteria), minimal ( >1 session & 0 measure-actions), none (0-1 sessions). Negative binomial regression models for each measure were used to examine the relationship between practice-level RISE dashboard engagement and quality performance. Practices with < 20 patients in the measure denominator were excluded from the analysis for that measure. Models were adjusted for EHR, year, and an offset term to account for the number of patients in practices’ measure denominator. Incidence rate ratios were reported; linear trends between dashboard engagement and quality performance were evaluated via orthogonal polynomial contrasts.

Results: Most of the 213 included practices were single specialty practices (96%) and used the EHR vendor Nextgen (43%). Practices had a median (IQR) of 2 (1-4) rheumatologists and 2611 (1448-8535) patients. Among practices in 2021, 13% were in the most engaged category, 41% in moderate, 26% in minimal, and 21% in none. The median (IQR) sessions per year was 9 (3-19); other engagement metrics are shown in Table 1. Compared to practices with no dashboard engagement, those who were most engaged had significantly higher performance on 4 of the 8 measures examined (osteoporosis screening, RA functional status assessment, RA periodic assessment of disease activity, and HBV safety screening), even after adjusting for covariates (Table 2; Figure 1). Three of these measures had a significant linear trend (p< 0.05) between higher engagement and higher performance.

Conclusion: Engagement with the RISE registry clinician dashboard was associated with higher quality measure performance on rheumatology-specific measures during a 3-year study period. Practices who were most engaged had significantly higher quality measure performance compared to those with no engagement on half of the measures examined. Further investigation is needed to understand how engagement with the dashboard may confer better quality measure performance for some but not all measures.

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ACR Meeting Abstracts - https://acrabstracts.org/abstract/higher-engagement-with-the-rise-registry-clinician-dashboard-is-associated-with-higher-performance-on-rheumatology-quality-measures-analysis-of-data-from-2020-2022/