Data Requirements
Clinician Profile
This profile includes demographics and other information required for building benchmark comparisons, and to uniquely identify the clinician.
Office Location Profiles
Office locations are recorded for each site where participating clinicians may deliver care that is reported in the AGA Registry. This profile includes descriptions of the clinical and ancillary staff positions at each location, as well as services provided, procedures performed and equipment.
Data Entry
Data may be entered using an online data entry and reporting tool provided to all registry participants or via a participating EMR product. Once data are entered into the registry, they are evaluated for completeness and validity using integrated quality and validity controls, and feedback is provided through online reports.
EMR Integration
The AGA Registry has been designed to include direct submission from electronic medical records (EMR). The AGA Registry offers two paths to systems integration: reporting using gMed's gGastro v4 or custom integration through FIGMD.
The AGA Registry is actively working with other EMR and clinical systems vendors to incorporate the registry directly into their software. As EMR providers are integrated with the AGA Registry, they will be listed on this website.
If you are an EMR provider and interested in AGA Registry certification, contact us for more information.
Patient Sampling
Pending full integration between practice EMRs and the AGA Registry, the AGA has established a sampling methodology to ease data entry time for participating clinicians. The following sampling methods are for practices that rely on the web-based electronic data collection tool for registry data entry.
Sample Methodology for CRC Prevention Data
To use the registry to track patients receiving CRC preventive services, a minimum sample of 30 consecutive patients each quarter is required. While a precise evaluation of the power of the sample collected for each practice is a variable that is unique to each practice, a distributed evaluation of samples of 10 to 70 patients per physician results in margins of error of +/- 6 to 15 percent for an expected adenoma detection rate (ADR) of 50 percent and +/- 5 to 13 percent for an expected ADR of 25 percent. The estimation resulted in a determination that 120 patients per year, 30 consecutive patients per quarter would yield margins of error +/- 5 to 9 percent for expected rates between 10 and 90 percent as a reasonable balance between precision of quality measures and burden of data entry. This number is higher than required for PQRI participation, but margins of error exceeding 10 percent and upwards of 15 percent are unlikely to be useful for other purposes.
Sample Methodology for IBD Data
Given the smaller IBD patient volume, all IBD patient records should be entered into the registry. For physicians with less than 50 IBD patients, this means initially entering data for each IBD patient to establish their registry record. Less time will be required to enter additional follow-up data for each patient and to add new patients over time. Because the registry would include the entire IBD population of participating physicians, no sampling would be needed.
Physicians with more than 50 IBD patients may want to stagger data entry to reduce the initial burden. For example, a practice with 200 IBD patients may want to set up 50 patient registry records per quarter so that over the course of a year, all patients are in the registry.
