Axon Registry: Will It Improve Care?
Initial measures in the Axon Registry will assess care for Parkinson disease, epilepsy, distal symmetric polyneuropathy, dementia, headache, multiple sclerosis, and sleep apnea.
The American Academy of Neurology (AAN) embarked on creating a registry to be used for quality improvement in December of 2014. The pilot phase completed in 2016. The Axon Registry® is a quality improvement registry that will
The Axon Registry is a centralized data warehouse that collects patient data and performs statistical analysis on certain existing neurology quality measures. Thus far, almost 2 million patient visits have been collected. This registry meets requirements for the merit-based incentive program through the quality payment program.
The information provided to practices and providers can be used to show current performance on the quality measures, and to develop a quality improvement project to improve the performance on the measures. This will directly improve patient care. The AAN developed the Axon Registry as part of the Academy’s mission of quality improvement in the
The Axon Registry works by automatically extracting data from the office- or practice-setting electronic health records. Data is transmitted directly to the registry. From a dashboard, participating neurologists can access the data, run queries on their own patient population, benchmark practice performance, and uncover potential areas for quality improvement. Importantly, the Axon Registry is designed to minimally affect practices and physician workflows as no additional data entry is needed.
Once set-up and integration with the electronic health records are complete, the registry collects data in the background from discrete data fields and clinical notes. The entirety of the clinical note and other areas are collected.
The Axon Registry collects data on quality measures developed by the AAN and approved by the AAN Board of Directors and several cross-cutting measures used by Centers of Medicare and Medicaid in the merit-based incentive program. Approximately 30 quality measures are present in the registry with more being added once approved.
A committee has been formed to select important and relevant quality measures that will affect most general neurology practices, but also some measures pertinent to neurology’s subspecialists. Thus far, six cross-cutting measures are included. The initial measures in the Axon Registry will assess care for Parkinson disease, epilepsy, distal symmetric polyneuropathy, dementia, headache, multiple sclerosis, and sleep apnea.
The AAN will only have access to aggregated de-identified data, not individual patient data. Based on the aggregate data, the AAN will assess neurology provider performance and look at overall trends in the patient population. Further, the information from the Axon Registry will also allow the AAN to better focus its educational programming and service offerings for members to address gaps and barriers to care.
Practices that join the Axon Registry enter into an agreement with the AAN. This includes a HIPAA-compliant Business Associate Agreement and a Data Use Agreement. The Axon Registry captures and stores Personal Health Information and identifiable provider information in accordance with federal and state laws and regulations. Identifiable provider or practice data will not be published. Moreover, the AAN will not have access to individual patient data.
Participation in the Axon Registry will have several benefits. A practice or provider can obtain data that have been calculated on existing quality measures. The data can be used for reimbursement in the quality payment program or other similar programs that may be developed.
In addition, participation in the Axon Registry assists in fulfilling three of the four areas within the quality payment program (quality, improvement activities, and advancing care information). The fourth component is solely based on Medicare claims data that will come from the Centers of Medicare and Medicaid.
A practice can also use the data to identify care gaps based on poor performance on specific measures compared with peers in similar care settings. Most importantly, the data can be used as baseline data, which is absolutely essential in developing quality improvement projects that will improve patient care, and patient satisfaction, and it will decrease health care costs, thereby achieving the
Although an important first step, the development of quality measures has not alone driven
In summary, the AAN is committed to providing the Axon Registry at no cost to its US members to assist in improving patient care by providing meaningful data that will be used for quality improvement purposes. To learn more about the Axon Registry and enroll, visit AAN.com/view/Axon or send questions to: registry@aan.com.
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