Leveraging the IRIS Reading Center for Maximum Impact

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By Charlotte Yarbrough

IRIS provides a dedicated resource for our client partners to bring highly specialized care to their patients: the IRIS Reading Center (IRC). The IRIS Reading Center is a leading telemedicine physician group specializing in eye care.

The IRC provides a complete solution for our client partners to solve for the problems of access and cost by providing comprehensive care to their diabetic patient populations- one that specifically allows for the remote interpretation of fundus images captured in non-eye care settings. 

As our organization grew and evolved with time, a comparable progression happened within the IRC.   These advancements have been critical for our organization to continue to meet the ever-changing needs within the market. 

Presently, the IRC physician services group is made up of 125 board-certified retina specialists and ophthalmologists, but early on in our history, the group was comprised of less than ten providers. This monumental growth has allowed us to scale our services and operate in all fifty United States.  Furthermore, the 125 individual physicians within our group cumulatively hold 313 active medical licenses.  So, while the IRC operates in all United States, the number of licenses our providers hold demonstrates our depth in each state and the full scope of our national reach.  We have flexed from a state of constantly recruiting new providers to a state where our group can now provide consultative interpretations for over 10M encounters annually.         

Quality of care is our highest mission at IRIS and the IRC. Due to the growth we’ve experienced over the last few years, we have devoted extensive resources to support quality measures and outcomes. Each physician within the IRC goes through a highly competitive selection process and has been vetted extensively in order to satisfy the standards of the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA), while also meeting Joint Commission and URAC standards.  It’s also worth mentioning that the IRC operates under a clinical oversight and leadership team with a combined 90+ years of experience in practicing medicine and academia – we stand behind the care provided by the IRC.  A good measurement of this, I believe, is that at IRIS, we would trust any one of our physicians to personally care for our loved ones. 

Much like we pride ourselves on being camera agnostic at IRIS, we understand that not all our client partners may need to leverage the IRIS Reading Center – we have options available that allow them to utilize their own eye care providers instead.  Part of designing a tailor-made program for our client partners is making the decision to either include or exclude the IRC for remote interpretations.   As another option, we can also absorb our client partners’ eye care resources within our physician group, eliminating the administrative and qualitative burdens associated with managing that aspect of the program. 

We pride ourselves on flexibility at IRIS because we know that our clients have unique needs.  We commit to delivering results to our clients within one business day, but our clients leveraging the IRC often see results delivered within 2-3 hours of the retinal images being captured. This best practice adds to the patient/member experience because they no longer are waiting days or weeks for results.  They can get in front of specialized care faster if needed – we know that diabetic retinopathy progression can happen rapidly, having devastating lifelong effects on their vision.  There are a host of other KPIs and metrics that are optimized when client partners opt-in with the IRC. 

According to the American Academy of Ophthalmology (AAO), we are currently in the midst of a shortage of physicians between now and 2025.  As opposed to competing for patients, our imaging solution program allows providers to remotely identify new patients with disease that need to be seen urgently, allowing ophthalmologists and retina specialists to fill their schedules with patients that need their specialized care, while also improving their workflows and practices’ efficiency. Our solution proactively creates a pathway for patients to have remote access to specialized care. Now, in the time of Covid-19, we know just how valuable virtual care can be.  Our solution proactively created a pathway for patients and members to have access to specialized care remotely. 

The IRIS Reading Center is just one of many reasons why IRIS is the best solution for a complete diabetic retinopathy program in the point-of-care setting.  We invite you to learn more about this valuable resource by contacting info@retinalscreenings.com or visiting our website www.retinalscreenings.com

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