News

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT:
Alven Weil
Premier Inc.
704.733.5797

Premier healthcare alliance introduces new tool for member hospitals to improve patient care, reduce costs

Premier OperationsAdvisor Productivity™ labor management and accountability application combines productivity measurement with comparative data analysis and benchmarking

CHARLOTTE, N.C. (August 7, 2007) — The Premier Inc. healthcare alliance today launched an enhanced productivity analysis and reporting application for its member and client hospitals to assist them in improving patient care while safely reducing costs.

Premier OperationsAdvisor™ (OA) Productivity is an integrated product created for healthcare organizations to positively engage their labor force in anticipation of pending reimbursement changes. By combining productivity measurement with comparative analysis, facilities will be able to access two views of their performance: a current view at the department (cost center) level against internally set targets, and an external view of facility and departmental performance via top performance peer groups chosen from the more than 450 facilities that participate in Premier OperationsAdvisor’s Quarterly Benchmarking application.

“Premier realizes that every healthcare organization aims to deliver the highest quality of patient care. We also know that hospitals face enormous challenges, such as balancing labor costs and customer and employee satisfaction,” said Stephanie Alexander, senior vice president and general manager for Premier Healthcare Informatics. “With labor costs comprising approximately 60 percent of non-profit hospital total operating expense, labor management applications such as OA Productivity are becoming a key management tool.”

The new OA Productivity application incorporates features uniquely suited for effective labor management. To ease the burden of report creation and distribution, bi-weekly and monthly productivity reports are automatically e-mailed to all department and senior managers, allowing for quick evaluation of performance and determination of the factors driving improvement opportunities. Thresholds of performance are set, with departments performing outside of these thresholds automatically added to a ‘Watch List.’ To aid in accountability, after a pre-set period of time, department managers on the Watch List will be prompted to create an Action Plan, which is immediately available for review and automatically archived.

“By including the ability for users to correlate outcomes measures at the department level with built-in accountability features, Premier has created an application that will allow for effective management of labor costs while also focusing on the quality of services delivered,” Alexander said.

Another feature of the new OA Productivity application is the ability of healthcare organizations to submit up to five quality measures per department, which are then graphed and correlated with the department’s worked hours statistic (WHpU). These outcome measures can include clinical and ancillary department quality measures, as well as measures of patient and employee satisfaction. Using OA Productivity’s report builder functionality, the outcomes measures can also be tracked against other labor statistics, including overtime, agency usage and skill mix.

About Premier, 2006 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award recipient
Serving 1,700 hospitals and more than 47,000 other healthcare sites, Premier is the largest healthcare alliance in the United States dedicated to improving patient outcomes while safely reducing the cost of care. Owned by not-for-profit hospitals, Premier operates one of the nation's largest healthcare purchasing networks and the most comprehensive repository of hospital clinical and financial information. Premier Insurance Management Services, Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary, operates one of the largest policy-holder owned, hospital professional liability risk-retention groups in healthcare. Headquartered in San Diego, Premier has offices in Charlotte, N.C., Philadelphia, and Washington. For more information, visit www.premierinc.com.