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Premier healthcare alliance expert to discuss national quality and cost improvement collaborative at HFMA winter conference

Hospitals reducing mortality, implementing evidence-based care more often as a part of QUEST; Initiative serving as a test bed for critical healthcare reforms

CHARLOTTE, N.C. (January 20, 2010) – Premier healthcare alliance expert Leslie Schultz, PhD, CPHQ, senior director of QUEST and Knowledge Transfer, will discuss Premier's national quality and cost improvement collaborative successes at the Healthcare Financial Management Association's 2010 Mid-Winter Conference on January 21 in Orlando, Fla.

Premier's QUEST^®: High Performing Hospitals collaborative is showing hospitals can simultaneously achieve substantial quality and cost improvements. Schultz will discuss results from the first year of the project and how hospitals are moving forward to improve patient satisfaction and reduce instances of harm. QUEST also addresses steps being taken in healthcare reform, including quality measures development and the national expansion of value-based purchasing (VBP).

Experts from hospitals participating in QUEST are driving reductions in mortality in part through the increased implementation of evidence-based care. Gail Hicks, RN, MSN, director of Nursing, North Side Hospital and Johnson City Specialty Hospital of Mountain States Health Alliance in Johnson City, Tenn., and Jan Mathews, RN, MPHA, director of Clinical Performance, Gaston Memorial Hospital of CaroMont Health in Gastonia, N.C., discussed these results on a recent national teleconference.

"The original 157 hospitals in the first year of QUEST, in treating 2.3 million patients, were able to save 8,043 lives and $577 million," said Schultz. "With a main focus on patients and a structured approach to measurement, gap identification, opportunity analysis, improvement methodology and shared learning, these hospitals provided an estimated 24,818 additional patients with all evidence-based appropriate care."

Gaston Memorial and North Side and Johnson City hospitals have achieved the QUEST top performance threshold for evidence-based care delivery and cost containment.

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 the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, 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.

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.

Premier's Advisor Live^® is a teleconference series, open to the public, which provides information and discussion on timely topics and best practices in healthcare. There is no charge to participate. To register, obtain additional information or access past audio recordings, visit www.premierinc.com/advisorlive.

About the Premier healthcare alliance, Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award recipient
Premier is a performance improvement alliance of more than 2,500 U.S. hospitals and 80,000-plus other healthcare sites using the power of collaboration to lead the transformation to high quality, cost-effective care. Owned by hospitals, health systems and other providers, 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 has worked 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 an office in Washington. https://premierinc.com. Stay connected with Premier on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.