News
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT:
Alven Weil
Premier healthcare alliance
704.733.5797
Solution that facilitates physician-executive communications, addresses healthcare reform challenges now available to hospitals nationwide
Premier healthcare alliance's QualityAdvisor helps hospitals identify performance gaps and best practices to improve the quality and cost-effectiveness of care
Issue: Healthcare reform will increasingly tie hospital reimbursement to quality and safety performance. To prepare, hospitals need to understand and manage: readmissions, hospital-acquired conditions (HACs), complications, evidence-based measures and professional practice evaluations.
How: Integrate quality, safety and cost data to identify performance gaps; enhance communication between executives, doctors and data analysts; and leverage proven best practices that can help enhance performance.
Solution: Premier's enhanced QualityAdvisor™ and performance improvement collaboratives are helping hospitals significantly reduce mortality, readmissions, harm and costs to preserve Medicare margins, and enhance patient outcomes.
CHARLOTTE, N.C. (August 24, 2010) – The Premier healthcare alliance has officially launched its QualityAdvisor solution to help hospitals prevent harm, reduce costs and readmissions, and improve overall outcomes.
Hospitals nationwide can now access QualityAdvisor to facilitate communications between physicians, executives and data analysts regarding performance improvement efforts, as well as address value-based purchasing (VBP) and The Joint Commission Ongoing Professional Practice Evaluation (OPPE) requirements while identifying drivers behind outcomes.
"These enhancements will save us a substantial amount of time through standardized analysis and the sharing of information," said Karen Kennedy, senior clinical analyst at Palomar Pomerado Health in San Diego, a QualityAdvisor beta user. "They allow for interaction among our clinicians, executives and data analysts, ensuring that these groups are working together to drive quality and cost improvements."
QualityAdvisor helps users prepare for healthcare reform provisions that increasingly will tie payments to quality and performance. The solution provides timely, actionable information, highlights drivers of practice variation and monitors adherence to quality of care measures. QualityAdvisor also benchmarks utilization among Premier members and drills down to patient level details.
Leveraging clinical process expertise and knowledge from Premier's national performance improvement collaboratives such as the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services/Premier Hospital Quality Incentive Demonstration™ (HQID), a model for hospital value-based purchasing legislation; QUEST®: High Performing Hospitals collaborative; and its new ACO collaboratives, QualityAdvisor users benefit from the best practices of top performers and learn key elements of successful collaboration.
According to Keith J. Figlioli, Premier senior vice president of Healthcare Informatics, "This launch represents one of many steps the Premier alliance is taking to evolve our data offerings into an integrated platform that will provide more value to our members. We're focusing on breaking down the silos in care settings to align communication across all the stakeholders in healthcare. And we'll meet our members where they are to help them connect, organize and use information to understand where they need to be.
"It's an approach that will allow hospitals to evaluate, analyze and compare reform implications, including readmissions, HACs and complications, value-based purchasing, geographic variation and resource utilization," Figlioli said.
The enhanced QualityAdvisor includes KnowledgeBox®, a Web-enabled dashboard allowing hospital executives to easily view performance gaps and access best practices for improvement. With KnowledgeBox, executives can assess key performance indicators, benchmark against organizational goals and peer comparisons, and view gap analysis opportunities for operational, financial, clinical quality and safety performance on demand.
QualityAdvisor offers information regarding facility and patient populations using the nation's largest clinical and financial comparative database. This is achieved through: access to KnowledgeBox dashboards; industry standard clinical terminologies such as SNOMED-CT® to normalize resource data and benchmark utilization among Premier members; and quick and easy drill-down to patient-level details.
QualityAdvisor is a solution in Premier's QualityConnect™ performance improvement program, which has saved hospitals more than $284 million in the past year through reductions in readmissions, patient length of stay, complications and mortalities.
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.
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