Premier Inc. and 11 Hospitals Launch Initiative to Improve Maternal and Infant Health

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Premier Inc. (NASDAQ: PINC), a healthcare improvement company, is working with 11 leading hospitals on a perinatal collaborative designed to reach zero preventable maternal and neonatal harm and deaths.

Over the next two years, hospitals in Premier’s Perinatal Collaborative will design, test and adopt evidenced-based improvement strategies that can be replicated, standardized and scaled nationally. The collaborative, which launched in June, is part of Premier’s Bundle of Joy^™ Campaign to transform the quality, safety and cost of maternal and infant health.

“Our work with providers to improve care for women and infants remains a key area of focus as we aim to create a healthier delivery system,” said Susan DeVore, Premier CEO. “We know firsthand what can be accomplished by acting as a convener to facilitate collaboration, data sharing and the development of scalable solutions. Our goal is to measurably close the gap between the evidence and what is practiced by testing and adopting new delivery models that elevate the quality, safety and cost of perinatal care.”

Participants will focus on reducing mortality and disparities in care, preventing adverse events, ensuring patients are treated in the correct and most appropriate setting, increasing the delivery of evidence-based care, enhancing patient and family engagement, and improving the overall health of women and newborns. Premier will support collaborative participants using its nationally recognized performance improvement methodology, which leverages robust data and peer-to-peer benchmarks, as well as enables the sharing and scaling of successful improvement strategies and solutions.

The following participating hospitals are also owners of the American Excess Insurance Exchange (AEIX) reciprocal risk retention group, a captive professional liability insurance company that is managed by Premier.

• Baptist Health, Lexington, KY
• Baystate Medical Center, Springfield, MA
• Franklin Woods Community Hospital, Johnson City, TN
• MemorialCare Miller Children’s & Women’s Hospital, Long Beach, CA
• PeaceHealth Sacred Heart Medical Center at RiverBend, Springfield, OR
• Presbyterian Hospital, Albuquerque, NM
• Riverside Regional Medical Center, Newport News, VA
• Summa Health, Akron, OH
• Texas Health Harris Methodist Hospital, Fort Worth, TX
• West Virginia University Medicine – Camden Clark Medical Center, Parkersburg, WV

“This group’s unique, combined expertise is critical in providing the leading pathway for managing risk and improving perinatal safety,” said Barclay E. Berdan, FACHE, CEO of Texas Health Resources and Chairperson of the AEIX Board of Directors. “We are excited to be collaborating with Premier in its mission to improve the health of communities. We will work together to establish a systemwide model of care, including a culture of safety, high reliability and teamwork that supports sustainable improvements.”

Specifically, Premier experts will be paired on-site with participants to establish multidisciplinary, data-driven improvement initiatives to transform perinatal care design. This includes leveraging integrated technology and a comprehensive database that benchmarks against 1.2 million annual births to:

• Assess, measure and monitor each participant’s culture of safety and its impact on quality and cost, including liability expenses.
• Analyze population-focused outcomes measures, including in inpatient and outpatient obstetric and neonatal service areas, for maternal/neonatal industry-endorsed safety care processes to identify strengths and opportunities.
• Provide quarterly results on targeted perinatal services through a proprietary perinatal dashboard.
• Deliver an annual weighted performance improvement roadmap with actionable and sustainable best practices.

The collaborative builds on the learnings and successes gleaned from Premier’s years of work with hundreds of hospitals and key industry associations on the development, education and implementation of women and infant safety guidelines. This includes the Premier Perinatal Safety Initiative, which united a group of hospitals and helped them reduce maternal deaths and harm by 20 percent from 2008-2013.

Premier plans to broadly share and publish learnings from the collaborative, as well as scale proven innovations and further support efforts to improve maternal and infant health, in its next iteration of the QUEST^®quality improvement collaborative in January 2020.