News

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT:
Alven Weil
Premier Inc.
704.733.5797

Premier healthcare alliance, hospital experts to discuss successes in QUEST nationwide hospital collaborative at IHI National Forum

CHARLOTTE, N.C. (December 3, 2009) – Leaders from hospitals nationwide and the Premier healthcare alliance will speak at the Institute for Health Improvement (IHI) 21st Annual National Forum on Quality Improvement in Healthcare on December 8 in Orlando, Fla., sharing insights regarding Premier's QUEST®: High Performing Hospitals program and improving quality while safely reducing costs.

Discussing successes and best practices as a part of the QUEST collaborative will be: Glenn Crotty, Jr., MD, executive vice president and chief operating officer of Charleston Area Medical Center (CAMC) in Charleston, W.Va.; Angela Ward, Quality and Ancillary Services executive at Alegent Health in Omaha, Neb; Premier President and CEO Susan DeVore; and Premier Chief Medical Officer Richard Bankowitz, MD. CAMC and Alegent Health Mercy Hospital in Council Bluffs, Iowa, achieved Top Performer status in the first year of QUEST.

QUEST is a voluntary, three-year project made up of approximately 200 hospitals across 31 states, including urban/rural, large/small and teaching/non-teaching facilities. Developed in partnership with Premier and IHI, QUEST is designed to springboard hospitals to new levels of performance and inform public policies with meaningful solutions, supported by real results. To accomplish this, QUEST benchmarked participating facilities using data from Premier's clinical database to determine the "baseline" level of performance in cost, mortality and evidence-based care delivery. Hospitals were then challenged to overcome the main factors that lead to deaths, errors and excessive costs, and measure themselves against one another to achieve top performance based on the following goals:

Save lives: Eliminate avoidable hospital mortalities;
Safely reduce the cost of care: Reduce the costs for each patient's hospitalization;
Deliver the most reliable and effective care: Ensure that patients receive every recommended evidence-based care measure.

Moving forward for years two and three of the program, additional performance metrics will be added to QUEST, including:

Improve patient safety: Prevent incidents of harm in more than 30 categories, including healthcare-acquired infections and birth injuries;
Increase satisfaction: Improve the patient's overall care experience and loyalty to the care providing facility.

Results from the first year of the project released on October 21 show that the original 157 QUEST hospitals have saved an estimated 8,043 lives and $577 million in one year. Of the approximately 2.3 million patients treated annually in these hospitals, 24,818 additional patients received treatments that met the highest quality patient care standards when compared to baseline performance at the outset of the project.

QUEST benefits from an Advisory Panel of experts from 20 of the country's top healthcare organizations, such as the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, National Quality Forum, and Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.

About Premier Inc., 2006 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award recipient
The Premier healthcare alliance is more than 2,300 U.S. hospitals and 64,000-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. Follow Premier on Twitter.