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Premier Inc.
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Monongalia Health System expands Premier healthcare alliance affiliation to include Web-based infection tracking solution

New participant in Premier's QUEST initiative will use SafetySurveillor to help prevent healthcare-associated infections and optimize antibiotic use

CHARLOTTE, N.C. (September 23, 2009) – Monongalia Health System of Morgantown, W.Va., is expanding its relationship with the Premier healthcare alliance by implementing Premier's SafetySurveillor^® Web-based infection tracking and antimicrobial utilization solution. The health system will use SafetySurveillor to help prevent healthcare-associated infections (HAIs) and optimize antibiotic use, thereby protecting patients more effectively while safely reducing hospital costs.

"Mon Health System is committed across our organization to drive improvements in quality, safety and cost," said Linda Allen, vice president of Quality and Information Systems at Mon General Hospital. "The acquisitions of SafetySurveillor, as well as our participation in Premier's QUEST national collaborative will not only help us achieve our goals, but it will also allow us to offer the best patient care in infection control and harm avoidance."

SafetySurveillor is being utilized to reduce harm as a part of the QUEST^®: High Performing Hospitals collaborative, a voluntary, three-year project with nearly 200 not-for-profit hospitals across 31 states. Premier recently expanded participation in QUEST, adding more than 30 additional hospitals, including Mon General.

"SafetySurveillor is a technology that helps increase efficiency, reduce infection rates and automate surveillance efforts," said Premier's Scott D. Pope, Pharm.D., SafetySurveillor national director. "More than 270 hospitals rely on to it to effectively manage infection control surveillance, prevention and reporting efforts."

The Infection Control and Pharmacy modules in SafetySurveillor allow pharmacists to obtain precise alerts and reports on specified usage of selected antibiotics to help improve outcomes, reducing patient length of stay and associated costs.

SafetySurveillor also helps hospitals meet state-mandated public reporting of certain HAIs, including screening for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and Clostridium difficile, some of the most common and harmful infections found in hospitals today. With the automated SafetySurveillor system, hospitals can detect HAIs, alert staff and facilitate timely intervention to reduce and prevent infections.

As participation in QUEST grows and SafetySurveillor is applied as an infection tracking solution in hospitals, patients nationwide are benefitting from improved preventative care. Developed in partnership with the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), QUEST is designed to springboard hospitals to new levels of performance and inform public policies with tangible 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 – Achieve a mortality rate that is 18 percent less than expected (O/E = 0.82).
Safely reduce the cost of care – Reduce inpatient costs below the midpoint among participating hospitals.
Deliver the most reliable and effective care – Deliver every recommended evidence-based care measure, sometimes called "perfect care," for patients at least 84 percent of the time.
Improve patient safety (year 2 measure) – Prevent incidents of harm in 30 categories, including healthcare-acquired infections (HAIs) and birth injuries.
Increase patient satisfaction (year 2 measure) – Dramatically improve the patient care experience.

Premier is one of the HAI surveillance system software vendors participating in a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention project to develop a standards-based solution for transmission of HAI data from hospitals using existing commercial software systems to the agency's National Healthcare Safety network.

SafetySurveillor is a part of Premier's SafetyConnect™ program, a comprehensive, integrated product and service offering aimed at addressing the pressing safety and infection-related challenges facing healthcare organizations today.

About Monongalia Health System
Mon Health System is an integrated healthcare delivery system that provides a full range of family centered care to residents of north-central West Virginia and southwestern Pennsylvania. Mon General Hospital, a 189-bed community hospital, is the cornerstone of the Mon Health System. Mon General Hospital's medical, nursing and support staff provide high-tech/high touch care in a community hospital setting with a focus on providing patients with the best healthcare experience possible. Its first-class physicians, nursing staff, clinical technicians and support staff place an emphasis on creating a positive patient experience.

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.