APA Launches Registry With Sheppard Pratt as First Participant

APA last month launched its national mental health registry, PsychPRO (Psychiatric Patient Registry Online), to help psychiatrists deliver high-quality care and meet new quality reporting requirements of the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act (MACRA), as well as reporting requirements for Maintenance of Certification (MOC).

The registry will also drive future research to develop better ways to treat and prevent psychiatric illnesses and help the field of psychiatry develop and test its own quality measures.

The fact that Sheppard Pratt Health System, the nation’s largest private nonprofit provider of psychiatric and substance abuse services, has agreed to be the first large health system to participate in PsychPRO is a testament to the potential usefulness of the registry for psychiatry, said APA CEO and Medical Director Saul Levin, M.D., M.P.A.

“We are pleased to offer this important tool to help psychiatrists meet new quality reporting requirements and maintain professional recertification, and we are excited about the research potential of this valuable resource for our patients and for the nation,” Levin said. “We are privileged to be working with Sheppard Pratt Health System, one of the country’s top mental health systems, at the beginning of this effort.”

Development of the registry has been carefully deliberated by APA’s governance structure, with critical input from councils, the Assembly, and the Board of Trustees, which gave final approval for development of the registry last spring. APA has established the Registry Oversight Work Group, which will report to the Board of Trustees and oversee PsychPRO. An advisory group consisting of PsychPRO participants will be established to help the APA administration refine the registry and drive innovation based on the emerging needs of the profession and patients.

Sheppard Pratt has 83 psychiatrists eligible to participate in APA’s registry. Sheppard Pratt will have a seat on APA’s Advisory Group and Harsh K. Trivedi, M.D., M.B.A., who is president and CEO of Sheppard Pratt, will initially chair the PsychPRO Advisory Group.

“We are proud to be the first health system to support the APA in establishing a patient registry,” Trivedi said in a statement. “We feel that it is imperative to give people the ability to make informed decisions about their care through meaningful outcomes data. We also want to support dedicated physicians and care providers so that they may more easily report quality data and maintain their board certification.”

In comments to Psychiatric News, Trivedi outlined why the registry can be immediately helpful to individual clinicians, and how over time the registry will empower research, enhance treatment, and improve population health.

“One of the benefits of having this registry is that data can be automatically and securely delivered from our own electronic medical record [at Sheppard Pratt] into the APA registry, also incorporating data from a patient portal,” Trivedi said. “The greatest immediate benefit for our clinicians is that this can happen without manual input of data or additional administrative burdens on providers.”

In this way, clinicians at Sheppard Pratt will almost effortlessly fulfill requirements of not only insurers but also MOC. “Since it is a quality improvement effort, psychiatrists will qualify in terms of the MOC Part IV required activity and meet board certification criteria simply by submitting clinical data to the registry.”

He added, “The reality is that with the passage of MACRA and MIPS [Merit-Based Incentive Payment System], there is already a requirement to submit the data elements that will be the first pieces of the APA registry,” Trivedi said. “Having this registry makes it easier and reduces the extra steps that clinicians might have to take themselves.”

When the registry is fully operational, it will provide the kind of aggregated data that can allow clinicians and health systems to benchmark themselves and—in the manner of continuous quality improvement—help all participants improve the care they provide. Trivedi noted that other medical specialty groups that have created registries have already demonstrated the potency of this tool to transform clinical practice and improve public health.

He cited the oncology field, which was the first to establish a large national patient registry. “The ability of practitioners to put in actual data regarding patient treatment and outcome has really revolutionized the oncology field in terms of being able to provide the right kind of care for the right patient at the right time in their illness,” he said. “That’s the real power that a registry can provide.” ■