Big Data, Miniregistries: A Rapid-Turnaround Solution to Get Quality Improvement Data into the Hands of Medical Specialists.

Context: Disease registries enable priority setting and batching of clinical tasks, such as reaching out to patients who have missed a routine laboratory test. Building disease registries requires collaboration among professionals in medicine, population science, and information technology. Specialty care addresses many complex, uncommon conditions, and these conditions are diverse. The cost to build and maintain traditional registries for many diverse, complex, low-frequency conditions is prohibitive. Objective: To develop and to test the Specialty Miniregistries platform, a collaborative interface designed to streamline the medical specialist's contributions to the science and management of population health. Design: We used accessible technology to develop a platform that would generate miniregistries (small, routinely updated datasets) for surveillance, to identify patients who were missing expected utilization, and to influence clinicians and others to change practices to improve care. The platform was composed of staff, technology, and structured collaborations, organized into a workflow. The platform was tested in five medical specialty departments. Main Outcome Measure: Proof of concept. Results: The platform enabled medical specialists to rapidly and effectively communicate clinical questions, knowledge of disease, clinical workflows, and improvement opportunities. Their knowledge was used to build and to deploy the miniregistries. Each miniregistry required 1 to 2 hours of collaboration by a medical specialist. Turnaround was 1 to 14 days. Conclusions: The Specialty Miniregistries platform is useful for low-volume questions that often occur in specialty care, and it requires low levels of investment. The efficient organization of information workers to support accountable care is an emerging question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]