(She leads the Academy’s quality of care programs and the teams that are responsible for clinical guidance, public health and data analytics initiatives, including the Academy’s IRIS Registry.) “As of April 1st 2021, about 3,000 practices are contributing their EHR data to the database we have data on 68 million unique patients and 387 million visits. “The IRIS Registry started in 2013,” notes Flora Lum, MD, vice president of Quality and Data Science for the AAO since 2015. Here, people with extensive experience with two of the current databases in the United States-the American Academy of Ophthalmology’s IRIS (Intelligent Research In Sight) Registry, and the Vestrum database, currently working exclusively with retina specialists-share their experience, discuss the pros and cons of these systems, and offer their thoughts on where this technology may lead us in the future. As part of this unfolding story, the evolution of electronic health records has led to the possibility of collecting and analyzing enormous amounts of data-and as people have begun exploring this possibility, large databases of information have begun to spring up. A s we move into the digital era, a host of new technologies (and the problems and advantages that accompany them) continue to appear.
