Impact of Electronic Diabetes Registry Use on Care and Outcomes in Primary Care

This paper examines the impact of using disease registry meeting meaningful use criteria. We specifically examine the impact of the use of a) registry for patient reminders and b) registry for quality improvement on the quality of care and hospital utilization. Registries are essentially IT artifacts features within Electronic Medical Record (EMR) systems. Patient records from 51 urban practices and 12513 patients suffering from type II diabetes were analyzed. The results suggest that for patients without congestive heart failure, the use of disease registry is significantly associated with improvement of quality of care and lower hospital utilization rate. Based on the analysis of the data, this paper develops a series of propositions for future confirmatory analysis to establish causality.