How Premier shares knowledge nationwide to improve local healthcare
Premier is a hospital performance improvement alliance with 1,700 participating not-for-profit hospitals and health systems serving communities nationwide. Premier’s core purpose is “To improve the health of communities.” To accomplish this, we bring our member hospitals together to share knowledge on ways that improve local healthcare.
Why Premier exists: Not-for-profit hospitals created Premier as a way to better serve their patients by working together to overcome the challenges posed by our nation's often fragmented and inefficient healthcare system. Through Premier, hospitals share knowledge and resources to provide patients with reliably high-quality healthcare at the lowest cost.
How Premier works: Through Premier, more than 1,500 hospitals nationwide share and analyze clinical and financial data, evaluate thousands of medical products, take part in educational sponsoring seminars and conferences, and share best practices. Collaborating through Premier allows hospitals to uses facts to determine the best practices and products that drive the best patient outcomes.
What Premier does:
- Share knowledge about and cooperatively purchase hospital products and services: Premier organizes member committees to evaluate products and services and select those to be placed on contract. Using the buying clout of the entire group of hospitals, Premier staff negotiates contracts. These contracts are approved by the member committees. Premier’s field force works with hospitals to implement contracts. This collaborative action reduces hospital’s staffing needs, improves productivity, and delivers billions of dollars in validated savings to our member hospitals. Over the past three years, member hospitals have reported more than $2.5 billion in savings through their participation in Premier.
- Share clinical knowledge to improve patient outcomes: Premier operates the nation’s largest and most detailed clinical and financial database, holding information on more than 130 million patient discharges. Web-based tools allow hospitals to compare their performance in specific areas to peers and best performers, find opportunities for improvement, and track the results of their efforts. This data warehouse is used by the Food and Drug Administration for drug surveillance and by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to evaluate next-generation payment models.
- Enable hospitals to share insurance claims experience and risk: Hospitals work together through Premier to cover the professional liability risks they face. They also share knowledge on ways to improve patient safety and reduce risks. As a result, participants gain control over insurance costs while improving the care they deliver.
Who owns Premier: Approximately 200 not-for-profit hospitals and healthcare systems, including large systems operating multiple hospitals; academic medical centers associated with universities; and community-owned hospitals entirely own Premier. Owners range from small and rural to large inner-city facilities. Owner hospitals and health systems share the not-for-profit purpose of operation for social good, and they share with Premier the core purpose of improving the health of communities.