The RISE Registry: A Powerful Collaboration Tool for Clinicians & Researchers

RISE allows users to submit for three MIPS categories: Quality, Promoting Interoperability and Improvement Activities. The fourth category, Cost, is calculated by CMS and no data submission is required. Participants may choose to submit to MIPS as a group or individually. RISE users benefit from expert knowledge offered by ACR registry staff and the technical vendor for RISE, FIGmd, regarding MIPS reporting requirements, bonus points for submitting via a QCDR and assistance through the reporting process.

Currently, RISE collects data from more than 1,000 providers from (mostly) community practices of all sizes across the U.S. Participation in RISE is a benefit of ACR and ARP membership; there is no cost to members. Practices typically spend 10–15 hours over the course of six to eight weeks on the implementation process (see Figure 1, right); time can vary depending on the practice’s EHR. Participants will work with both ACR and FIGmd throughout the process.

Interested clinicians are encouraged to contact RISE staff to set up a demonstration of the tool and an inside look at the dashboard at the practice’s convenience prior to registering. 

Research Use
RISE is also an important tool for researchers interested in practice-based research, because it can be used to look for evolving trends in care, patient outcomes and best practices.² RISE is a national database that continuously collects data from the EHRs of participating practices. It is a treasure trove of data on clinical practice and has the potential to provide researchers with rich data that can inform evolving research needs.

RISE data go through several levels of cleaning and validation, including the removal of patient identifiers. This allows researchers and clinicians to confidently use RISE data to understand what is actually happening in real-world practices and how patients are affected by the care they are receiving. RISE data available for research currently contains information on approximately 1.5 million patients and 9 million patient encounters.

RISE offers access to data from a diverse patient population: not only the most common diagnoses of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and osteoarthritis, but also less common disorders, such as Takayasu’s arteritis, dermatomyositis and Behçet’s disease. RISE contains detailed information on patient demographics, such as age, insurance status and geography, and on clinical characteristics, such as diagnoses, medications and treatment outcomes, such as CDAI, RAPID3 and HAQ scores.

Fig. 2: Overview of the process to request and complete a project using data from the Rheumatology Informatics System for Effectiveness (RISE) registry.