Premier Alliance Hospitals Save $284 M in Improvements in Quality, Professional Practice Evaluation

Hospitals participating in the Charlotte, N.C.-based Premier healthcare alliance quality improvement program have saved more than $284 million over the past year through improvements in clinical performance and enhancements in professional practice evaluation.

Premier’s QualityConnect integrates quality and safety data to help hospitals make better decisions about harm prevention, including how to reduce HACs. It also supports The Joint Commission Ongoing Professional Practice Evaluation (OPPE) requirements.

QualityAdvisor combines clinically-proven methods with the nation’s largest clinical and financial comparative database of more than 600 facilities to provide timely, actionable information. QualityAdvisor identifies clinical and financial improvement opportunities, highlights drivers of practice variation and monitors adherence to quality of care measures.

As a part of QualityConnect, Premier Clinical Client Services teams made up of on-site performance engineers help create processes around OPPE and Focused Professional Practice Evaluation (FPPE) in anticipation of The Joint Commission surveys. Through methodologies such as the National Quality Forum’s "Hospital Performance: Additional Priority Areas" and the CareScience Risk Adjusted Average Length of Inpatient Hospital Stay Measure, patient outcomes metrics are used to trend patient demographics, treatment patterns, patient flow, resource utilization, provider comparisons, and events after admission and their resulting impacts in order to improve the quality of care provided while safely reducing costs.

Leveraging clinical process expertise and knowledge from national collaboratives such as the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services/Premier Hospital Quality Incentive Demonstration (HQID), the model for value-based purchasing legislation; the QUEST: High Performing Hospitals collaborative; and Premier’s new ACO collaboratives, QualityConnect members also benefit from the best practices of top performers and learn common elements of successful collaboration.