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Premier Healthcare Alliance Experts to Lead Discussions on Healthcare Associated Infections, Pay-for-Performance

Posted on: Wednesday, 13 June 2007, 15:01 CDT

Leaders from the Premier healthcare alliance will speak at conferences around the country in June, sharing exclusive insights regarding healthcare associated infections (HAIs) and pay-for-performance.

Premier experts will address HAIs at the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC) Annual Conference, June 24-28 in San Jose, CA. To help hospitals protect patients from HAIs, Premier offers SafetySurveillor™, an infection surveillance tool that allows hospitals to rapidly identify and isolate infections, including Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and Clostridium difficile, to stop the spread of contagions. With SafetySurveillor, hospitals have the ability to automate the surveillance of lab data and documentation of findings related to HAIs. This can be achieved across the entire hospital, not just in specified units.

Premier representatives will also discuss Premier's Hospital Quality Incentive Demonstration (HQID) pay-for-performance project with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) at the following conferences:

National Association for Healthcare Quality Continuing Education Session, Thursday, June 14 in Los Angeles, CA;

HFMA Annual Meeting, June 24-27 in San Diego, CA.

The HQID 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. As part of the project, more than 250 hospitals submit clinical quality data to Premier through the Perspective™ data warehouse. CMS, which approved a three-year extension of the project in February, then uses the data to identify and reward top performers in five clinical areas.

According to official Year 2 results from the project, released in January, participating hospitals raised overall quality by 11.8 percent in two years in the five clinical areas studied. That meant better care and outcomes for more than 800,000 patients. Improvements in quality of care over the first two years of the demonstration project saved 1,284 acute myocardial infarction (heart attack) patients, and patients received approximately 150,000 additional recommended evidence-based clinical quality measures or procedures, such as smoking cessation, detailed discharge instructions and pneumococcal vaccination.

About Premier, 2006 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award recipient

Serving 1,700 hospitals and more than 46,500 other healthcare sites, Premier 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. Headquartered in San Diego, Premier has offices in Charlotte, N.C. and Washington. For more information, visit www.premierinc.com.

Source: Business Wire

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