• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

Community Health Partners Is a Top Performer In Premier Inc. Pay-for-Performance Project

Posted on: Friday, 26 January 2007, 12:01 CST

Community Health Partners has been named one the top performers in a groundbreaking Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), Premier Inc. pay-for-performance project that rewards hospitals for delivering higher quality care in five clinical areas.

Community Health Partners was rated in the top decile, based on its second-year, overall quality score in the clinical focus areas of AMI, Heart Failure, Pneumonia. Based on this score, Community Health Partners will receive a bonus payment of $116,699 from CMS, which awarded incentive payments of $8.7 million to 115 top-performing hospitals. This is the second year Community Health Partners has ranked in the top decile in three areas, making them one of the top performers in the study.

"Providing outstanding patient care is our primary mission," said Dr. Donald Blanford, Chief Medical Officer at Community Health Partners. "We were pleased to participate in this demonstration and are proud that our performance was rated among the best. Over time, healthcare costs can be controlled by meeting quality standards that provide treatment before a condition worsens and that eliminate unnecessary procedures."

Data from the second year of the CMS/Premier Hospital Quality Incentive Demonstration (HQID), validated by CMS and reported publicly today, demonstrates a significant improvement in the quality of care across five clinical focus areas, including 1,284 heart attack patient lives saved.

For complete information about the HQID project, visit www.premierinc.com/qualitydemo.

HQID tracks process and outcome measures in five clinical areas -- acute myocardial infarction (AMI), heart failure, coronary artery bypass graft (CABG), pneumonia, and hip and knee replacement.

"For over a decade, Premier has been committed to working with hospitals to improve clinical quality and patient outcomes while safely reducing costs," said Richard Norling, president and chief executive officer of Premier Inc. "The findings from the first two years of the HQID project clearly show that the project is having a positive impact on the quality of care in our nation's hospitals and on the lives of patients and their families."

Serving 1,700 hospitals and 42,000 other healthcare sites, Premier Inc. is the largest healthcare alliance in the United States dedicated to improving patient outcomes while safely reducing the cost of care. Owned by not-for-profit hospitals, Premier operates the nation's largest healthcare purchasing network, the most comprehensive repository of hospital clinical and financial information and one of the largest policy-holder owned, hospital professional liability risk-retention groups in healthcare.

Community Health Partners is a full service, not-for-profit, integrated healthcare delivery system, which provides inpatient, outpatient and ancillary services to Lorain County and surrounding counties through its three hospital facilities, physician offices in many local communities throughout the area and specialized facilities. In addition, Community Health Partners has affiliations with University Hospitals of Cleveland to provide services such as advanced cardiac care, advanced cancer care and neonatology services. As a faith-based provider, Community Health Partners is part of Catholic Healthcare Partners, one of the largest not-for-profit healthcare systems in the United States and the largest healthcare system in Ohio.

Source: Business Wire

More News in this Category