NCDR Update | The ACC’s CathPCI Registry Physician Dashboard is a confidential web portal that allows invasive and interventional clinicians to readily take advantage of their own registry data to track and improve the quality of patient care. The dashboard allows physicians to privately view their registry data gauging performance on over 40 metrics including appropriateness of percutaneous coronary interventions (PCIs), volume of cases treated, observed and expected mortality, door-to-balloon times and vascular complications. It also allows comparisons to other CathPCI Registry physicians in aggregate. In addition to raising awareness of performance, the dashboard can also help physicians earn Maintenance of Certification Part IV credit.

The dashboard is truly physician-centric. If the clinician performs cath procedures at more than one NCDR facility, the dashboard offers both individual MD facility data as well as aggregate MD data from all their cath facilities. Aggregate physician data may be of particular value as an advocacy adjunct for the physician in meeting certification needs, maintaining hospital privileges and answering payer demands for clinician data requests. The dashboard offers the clinician an additional avenue to assess and assure the quality of your own cath lab data being collected—of particular value in hospital systems where ready access to your own performance has been impeded by the local hospital environment.

I have seen a powerful example of a clinician’s personal NCDR reports used successfully in defense of unjustified hospital accusations of incompetent care. The presentation of the benchmarked 40 quality metrics of this physician compared with his local and national peers easily surpassed the impact of any personal testimonials or diatribes brought for or against the doctor in this particular clinician’s situation. With the marked changes now occurring in the health care system, particularly surrounding accountability not only for clinical outcomes but also for our appropriateness of care and resource utilization—physician access to their own benchmarked performance measures, appropriate use criteria and utilization metrics offers an interactive, proactive opportunity to assess individual own practice style.

I encourage my FACC colleagues to explore this underappreciated and underutilized, free member benefit that is easily accessible through the ACC.org website.

How to log into the dashboard:

• Log into ACC.org using your ACC membership credentials (formerly your CardioSource.org credentials)
• Click on My ACC in the navigation bar to expand the drop down menu
• Select NCDR Physician Dashboard from the menu
• If this is your first time using the dashboard, you may need to validate you national provider identifier (NPI). Follow the link provided to update your NPI within the member profile on ACC.org.

More information and instructions can be found at ACC.org/PhysicianDashboard.

Ralph Brindis, MD, MPH, MACC, is the NCDR Sr. Medical Advisor and an ACC past-president.

Keywords: CardioSource WorldNews Interventions, National Cardiovascular Data Registries, CathPCI Registry

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