Charlotte, N.C.-based Premier Healthcare Alliance announced the results of its data sharing, analytics-driven initiative, saying the collaboration has saved its members approximately $11.65 billion and avoided 136,375 deaths over the course of five-and-a-half years.
The initiative, which Premier calls QUEST, has hospitals use an integrated technology platform that allows member hospitals (350 in total) to standardize and share patient data, performance improvement analytics, and evidence-based best practices. According to Premier, hospitals using QUEST have improved care significantly, reducing their mortality rates 14 percentage points lower than a matched sample of hospitals that weren't participating in the program. This included improvements in sepsis (21 percent of all deaths prevented), stroke, heart failure and respiratory infections (reduced by 6 percent each).
“Too often, the healthcare debate centers around the policies needed to incent change,” Susan DeVore, Premier president and CEO, said in a statement. “But we have learned that change can be driven from the inside, using data to pinpoint opportunity areas, friendly competition to ‘race to the top,’ and a collaborative model for sharing best practices. QUEST members are setting new standards in healthcare quality, efficiency and safety. Their results show these efforts to improve do not require additional cost – they actually reduce costs and save lives. It is our hope that hospitals across the country will benchmark against and seek to beat the QUEST performance levels.”
The QUEST collaborative, Premier says, has allowed these hospitals to identify best practices to reduce mortality and costs. The result is they have prevented 40,808 readmissions since 2011, 17,991 instances of harm since 2010, such as hospital-acquired infections, and provided approximately 109,851 additional patients with all appropriate, evidence-based care for all the clinical conditions assessed since 2008. Other improvements in care have included:
- Central line (central venous catheter) associated blood stream infections (CLABSI) rates by 82 percent;
- Injuries rates while in the hospital, including falls, by 71 percent;
- Pressure ulcers rates by 65 percent;
- Staph (septicemia) infection rates by 36 percent;
- Ventilator acquired pneumonia rates by 23 percent;
- Catheter-associated urinary tract infections (CAUTI) rates by 19 percent; and
- Birth trauma (perineal laceration) rates by 18 percent.
