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Overlake Hospital Medical Center to Continue Its Relationship With Premier Inc.

Posted on: Tuesday, 6 June 2006, 12:00 CDT

Overlake Hospital Medical Center, a 337-bed, not-for-profit regional medical center offering a full range of advanced medical services to the Puget Sound Region, has renewed its agreement with the Premier Inc. healthcare alliance to use Premier's Clinical Advisor for quality measurement and benchmarking. This marks the third consecutive renewal of Clinical Advisor dating back to the inception of the relationship in 1999.

"Since the initial purchase of Clinical Advisor, Overlake has significantly improved our quality of care and patient outcomes in several areas," said Dianna Reely, vice president of Patient Experience, Quality and Compliance and chief compliance officer at Overlake. "Clinical Advisor has played an integral role in these improvements, and we're happy to continue our affiliation with Premier."

Premier's Clinical Advisor is powered by the Perspective Online(TM) Web-based clinical comparative database, which provides patient-level detail to identify opportunities for improvement in clinical quality and efficiency. The Clinical Advisor solution offers assessment, consulting, knowledge-sharing and other customized services to help hospitals and health systems close gaps identified through use of comparative data.

Located in Bellevue, WA, Overlake, the only Level III Trauma Center in eastern Puget Sound, employs more than 2,100 people and has more than 700 active and courtesy physicians on staff. The hospital has been ranked as a top 100 heart program in the country and as a top performer in the state of Washington, as well as one of the most wired innovator hospitals and health systems in the nation.

"Similar to Overlake, Premier is constantly exploring ways, such as the HQID pay for performance project, by which it can assist its members in improving quality," said Stephanie Crow, director of Clinical Effectiveness at Overlake. "Such a progressive standpoint assures Overlake that, through this relationship, Premier will continue to be on the cutting edge of the significant changes all hospitals will face in the near future."

Premier's groundbreaking pay for performance Hospital Quality Incentive Demonstration (HQID) project with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) is the first national project of its kind, designed to determine if economic incentives to hospitals are effective at improving the quality of inpatient care. More than 250 hospitals are voluntarily participating. The project uses Premier's Perspective(TM) database, the largest clinical comparative database in the nation, to track hospitals' performance.

In year one of the demonstration, CMS awarded $8.85 million in incentives to the top-performing hospitals in the project. In addition, CMS-validated data from the first year of the HQID demonstrates a significant improvement in the quality of care across five clinical focus areas as measured by 33 nationally standardized and widely accepted quality indicators. The average improvement across the clinical areas was 6.6 percent. These performance gains have outpaced those of hospitals involved in other national performance initiatives. Approximately 235 acute myocardial infarction (heart attack) patients were saved as a result of quality improvements in that related focus area alone.

Also, mean quality scores for project participants on 17 key quality indicators are nearly 10 points higher on a 100-point scale than mean quality scores for the nation's hospitals as a whole, based on analysis of publicly reported data.

"Overlake has been a top performing hospital since it joined the Premier alliance, and member hospitals will continue to have the benefit of tapping into Overlake's extensive knowledge of the healthcare field," said Stephanie Alexander, senior vice president for Premier Healthcare Informatics. "We're happy to be afforded the opportunity to assist Overlake in achieving its quality goals for the foreseeable future, helping the hospital to better serve the patients of the Puget Sound Region."

About Overlake Hospital Medical Center

Overlake Hospital Medical Center is a nonprofit, independently operated community hospital offering, in association with medical staff, a wide range of selected health technologies and specialty services. Overlake provides healthcare services to the Greater Eastside from Bothell to Renton, and from the Cascades to Lake Washington, including Mercer Island. For more information, please visit www.overlakehospital.org.

About Premier Inc. and Healthcare Informatics

Premier Inc., is a strategic healthcare alliance that provides an array of performance solutions to hospitals and other providers. Premier's Healthcare Informatics unit offers performance measurement, benchmarking, and reporting products and related advisory services and methodologies to support health systems' and hospitals' quality improvement efforts. Among its products and services, Premier Healthcare Informatics offers the Advisor Suite(TM) of clinical and operational performance measurement and reporting solutions; best practice methodologies to directly implement quality improvement programs; project-specific guidance; and on-site expertise to support improvement of clinical outcomes and efficiency of care. Areas of expertise include JCAHO and CMS performance measurement, clinical and operational benchmarking, labor management programs, balanced scorecards, patient satisfaction, evidence-based research, and patient safety. For more information about Premier Healthcare Informatics, visit www.premierinc.com/informatics or call 800.805.4608.

Source: Business Wire

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