(Charlotte, N.C.) The Premier healthcare alliance has launched a major new strategic plan that will help hospitals leverage performance improvement data and knowledge sharing to prepare for and succeed under healthcare reform. As part of the plan, Premier will make significant new investments of more than $86 million over the next three years to expand the data foundation needed to support new models of healthcare delivery that encompass both acute and non-acute care settings, including Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs).

Premier is including new measures in informatics products to help hospitals predict reform impact, automate measures reporting and sustain quality and cost improvements in the areas of readmissions, value-based purchasing, infection prevention, waste reduction and harm avoidance.

Premier also is integrating intelligence from existing products and tools to give hospitals a more complete view into opportunities for further cost containment, care quality and patient safety gains.

Premier’s new integration and innovation efforts are being led by Keith J. Figlioli, Premier’s senior vice president of Healthcare Informatics.

“Using our data and collaborative capabilities, hospitals can compare their performance in specific areas, find opportunities for improvement and track the results of their efforts,” said Figlioli. “What’s missing in most systems today is integrated information from disparate sources, presented in a way that providers gain actionable insights. In reform, safety, productivity, utilization, supply chain efficiency and reimbursement are interrelated, which requires a single, strategic look into performance data. That’s why our investment in this area is so important.”

Premier has decades of experience in quality, safety and cost improvement, accumulating patient level information from more than 600 hospitals, with over 309 million hospital visits in its database. This new strategic innovation plan represents the next step in Premier’s efforts to evolve its data infrastructure and analytic capabilities to meet next-generation needs.

Premier’s informatics data integration plan will:

•Complete efforts to integrate clinical, financial, operational (labor and non-labor) and outcomes data from more than 2,300 member hospitals to present a holistic, action-oriented view of performance improvement.
•Create top performance measures based on reform provisions and make them widely available in the industry.
•Extend data collection and establish standards for non-acute and population-based measurement.
•Ensure data is specific enough to be assessed by condition and by physician practitioner.
•Incorporate measures from Premier “collaboratives” into products, services and knowledge transfer tools.
“Our data, collaborative execution and analytic capabilities are central to our successful efforts to define cost, quality and safety measurement approaches. In collaboration with our members, we are setting the pace for the development and execution of top performance in healthcare delivery,” said Premier’s President and CEO Susan DeVore. “Because we are exclusively owned by not-for-profit hospitals and understand that they must work together to transform care delivery, we are making this investment in infrastructure and business intelligence on their behalf to ensure they can survive and thrive under healthcare reform.”

Premier is a performance improvement alliance of more than 2,300 U.S. hospitals and 66,000-plus other healthcare sites working together to improve healthcare quality and affordability. Owned by not-for-profit hospitals, Premier maintains the nation’s most comprehensive repository of clinical, financial and outcomes information and operates a leading healthcare purchasing network. A world leader in helping deliver measurable improvements in care, Premier works with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and the United Kingdom’s National Health Service North West to improve hospital performance. Headquartered in Charlotte, N.C., Premier also has offices in San Diego, Philadelphia and Washington. www.premierinc.com