Premier Inc. Enhances Research Offerings, Partners with Leading Life Sciences Companies

CHARLOTTE, N.C. (January 17, 2019) — Premier Inc. (NASDAQ: PINC), a leading healthcare improvement company, has significantly enhanced its Premier Applied Sciences^® research division with new experts, partnerships, data and capabilities.

Premier Applied Sciences partners with industry leaders to develop, teach, test and research care delivery practices and real-world interventions for healthcare improvement. With recent enhancements to its Premier Applied Sciences offering, Premier experts can now leverage new data and analytics capabilities to conduct research that tracks the total patient journey; identifies patients with pre-existing conditions or diagnoses outside of the acute-care setting; and traces pre- and post-hospital patient encounters, such as medication fills, adherence and primary care visits.

Specifically, the enhancements include:

• A 30 percent increase in acute care data in the Premier Healthcare Database, which now includes HIPAA-compliant, all-payer clinical outcomes information from more than 980 U.S. hospitals and more than 210 million unique patients, or approximately 25 percent of inpatient discharges nationwide. One of the most comprehensive healthcare research databases in the U.S., the Premier Healthcare Database is the research arm of the PremierConnect^® performance improvement platform, which houses outcomes data on 45 percent of U.S. hospital discharges.
• The addition of supplementary microbiology results data to the Premier Healthcare Database. The data is derived from Premier’s clinical surveillance solution, powered by TheraDoc^®, and includes results, such as specimen source and observation status.
• A new database that integrates inpatient data from the Premier Healthcare Database with physician, facility and pharmaceutical claims data for longitudinal patient journey research.

“Our approach to healthcare research, innovation and improvement is to leverage the smartest intelligence available,” said Denise Juliano, the newly-appointed Group Vice President of Life Sciences, who now leads the Premier Applied Sciences team. “Not only is a robust clinical database imperative, but by integrating additional hospital data, microbiologic specificity and a separate linkage with claims data, Premier has created one of the most unique, intellectual and precise data assets available for healthcare research in the U.S. These enhancements will support our continued efforts to improve the cost and quality of healthcare, in partnership with life sciences companies, academic institutions and professional societies across the country.”

Premier’s research team includes epidemiologists, health economists, health services researchers, clinicians, statisticians and other experts. These experts leverage the Premier Healthcare Database to conduct data, inquiry and interventional research across all therapeutic areas, including cardiology, oncology, autoimmune diseases, infectious diseases, pain, pulmonology, gastroenterology and urology. For example, Premier works in partnership with life sciences companies to understand which therapies work best in real time and develops data-driven solutions to support them.

Examples of Premier’s current work with life sciences companies include:

• Premier’s value-based partnership with Amgen, which involves a cloud-based system to help support diagnosis and disease management of post-fracture patients who may be appropriate for an osteoporosis disease management program. The cloud-based system may assist in identifying patients with fragility fractures who visit emergency departments or are hospitalized, offer education to providers on care coordination and osteoporosis management, assist care coordination workflow follow up, and assess process and specified outcomes measures to support improvement in care. Three hospitals have agreed to participate in a testing program to evaluate the use of the cloud-based system in post-fracture care coordination over a six-month period. The expected goal is to evaluate the impact on care compared to a baseline assessment using the cloud-based system.
• Premier’s partnership with Janssen to conduct the first and largest study of its kind (QUANTUM AF) to address an unmet medical need for hospitalized patients with atrial fibrillation who are at risk for ischemic stroke. The QUANTUM AF study now includes 61 hospitals, 30 of which are randomized and implementing locally-designed quality improvement programs to improve the use of guideline-directed oral anticoagulation in patients with atrial fibrillation who at risk for stroke. The other 31 hospitals are randomized as the control.
• Premier’s collaboration with Merck, which was initially announced in 2016, to co-develop and test solutions to help improve patient care. In one project, the companies are developing a population health improvement program that includes a cloud-based application, provider education, and process and outcomes measures to help reduce the recurrence of Clostridium difficile infection (C. diff) by improving follow-up and management. It will be tested across five provider sites. In another project, the companies are working on a chronic disease model to identify and treat patients with type 1 and type 2 diabetes at risk for hypoglycemia and osteoporosis, which will be tested at two health systems.

“I am impressed each day by the work of the Premier Applied Sciences team and the companies we are working with,” Juliano added. “We all share a common goal: to get the answers to tomorrow’s healthcare questions today. It’s about meeting the needs of our health system members as the industry continues to evolve and shift toward value-based care and payment. Premier’s access to real-world data and analytics, leading industry innovators, a proven improvement methodology and seasoned experts allow us to get deep clinical insights on what needs to be done to make healthcare better in the future.”

With nearly two decades of research, Premier researchers have authored more than 95 articles in peer-reviewed publications. Additionally, the Premier Healthcare Database, which provides objective evidence- and population-based analyses of drugs, devices, treatments, disease states, resource utilization, epidemiology, healthcare costs and clinical outcomes, has been featured in more than 440 peer-reviewed publications.

Forward-Looking Statements

Matters discussed in this release that are not statements of historical or current facts, are “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements may involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause the actual results, performance or achievements of Premier to be materially different from historical results or from any future results or projections expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on any forward-looking statements. In addition to statements that explicitly describe such risks and uncertainties, readers are urged to consider statements in the conditional or future tenses or that include terms such as “believes,” “belief,” “expects,” “estimates,” “intends,” “anticipates” or “plans” to be uncertain and forward-looking. Forward-looking statements may include comments as to Premier’s beliefs and expectations as to future events and trends affecting its business and are necessarily subject to uncertainties, many of which are outside Premier’s control. More information on potential factors that could affect Premier’s financial results is included from time to time in the “Forward-Looking Statements,” “Risk Factors” and “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations” sections of Premier’s periodic and current filings with the SEC and available on Premier’s website at investors.premierinc.com. Forward-looking statements speak only as of the date they are made. Premier undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise that occur after that date.