Improving Patient Care with the AAPM&R Registry: Use Case Scenarios-Session Recording

Video Transcription

Video Summary

The AAPM&R Data Registry session, chaired by Dr. Mark Hwang, focused on improving patient care through real-world data collection for two key diagnoses: ischemic stroke and low back pain. The registry aggregates clinical data and patient-reported outcomes (PROs), using PROMIS-29 surveys, uniquely capturing the patient perspective on physical function, pain, mood, fatigue, and social participation. Multiple sites including Shirley Ryan Ability Lab, Vanderbilt University, and Brooks Rehabilitation participate, providing demographic and outcome data enabling benchmarking at site, clinician, and national levels.<br /><br />Stroke presentations by Drs. Geis and Harvey highlighted early data insights showing age and stroke laterality differences in outcomes like pain interference and fatigue. Dr. Harvey demonstrated use of longitudinal individual patient PRO data to guide targeted clinical discussions. Challenges include improving outpatient follow-up survey response rates, institutional IT support, and physician champions to optimize data collection workflows.<br /><br />Low back pain discussions by Drs. Yang and Lee underscored practical clinical utility of routine PRO collection integrated via electronic health records. Case examples illustrated how PROMIS data tracks symptom trajectories and reveals less obvious issues (e.g., depression, fatigue) not usually captured in typical clinical encounters. Medication use data enables correlation with outcomes trends.<br /><br />The registry offers tools for filtering data by demographics, diagnosis, medications, and procedures, with ongoing development of enhanced EHR integration, patient access to their data, and expanded diagnoses including spasticity. The session emphasized the registry’s role in advancing physiatry by generating specialty-specific quality metrics, supporting research, benchmarking, and enhancing patient-centered care through actionable data. Increasing site participation and engagement remain priorities to enrich the data and realize the registry’s full potential.

Keywords

AAPM&R Data Registry

patient care improvement

ischemic stroke

low back pain

PROMIS-29 surveys

patient-reported outcomes

clinical data aggregation

benchmarking

electronic health records integration

physiatry quality metrics

real-world data collection