The Premier healthcare alliance has enhanced two apps that help providers reduce harm and improve labor productivity to deliver high-quality, cost-effective care and succeed under newly enacted reform mandates.

The apps are housed on PremierConnect™, an integrated technology platform combining and benchmarking patient level quality, safety and financial outcomes data with national standards. IBM recently recognized PremierConnect with the 2012 CTO Innovation Award. The platform accesses data from 2,700 hospitals, 90,000 other care sites and 400,000 physicians across Premier’s membership. By sharing highly accurate information, providers can make high-quality and efficient care delivery decisions.

New risk-adjusted readmissions capabilities have been added to QualityAdvisor™, which helps providers reduce hospital-acquired conditions, mortality, readmissions and costs. The new capabilities allow users to account for cross-hospital patient variation and risk by monitoring their entire inpatient population and evaluating readmission rates relative to a national scale. The app also now generates more actionable results, helping hospitals avoid potential problems with quicker interventions. This new “early warning” signal helps hospitals reduce payor penalties by improving care practices and patient experience while reducing financial risk.

Physician group, skilled nursing, home health, urgent care and rehabilitation facilities can now access the OperationsAdvisor® app, which helps providers monitor, compare and assess labor productivity. This allows all care sites within a health system to integrate their operational, financial and labor data so they can identify the greatest opportunities to improve system level efficiency. Users can also more accurately benchmark the performance of business support services, including accounting, human resources, information technology, legal, marketing and materials management.

“Timely, efficient care means providers can better assess the readiness of patients for discharge, allowing them to facilitate the right care transitions, which are fundamental in an era of clinically integrated networks and accountability,” said Keith J. Figlioli, Premier senior vice president of healthcare informatics. “Even the best performing health systems have opportunities to improve quality and lower costs. But we can’t see a complete picture of areas for improvement without integrating data across all delivery system care sites. PremierConnect offers providers real world knowledge on how to use their data and turn it into meaningful information across the continuum of care.”

PremierConnect accesses the nation’s largest outcomes database, containing information from 1 in 4 U.S. hospital discharges, 2.5 million real-time clinical transactions daily and nearly $43 billion in annual purchasing data. In addition, with the world’s largest social healthcare network, health systems across the nation can interactively collaborate in PremierConnect to share learnings and accelerate the adoption of best practices that improve the health of U.S. communities.

Premier has placed among the nation’s 100 top technology innovators on the InformationWeek 500 list for three years in a row. On 2012’s list, Premier was ranked 30^th and third in the healthcare industry.

About the Premier healthcare alliance, Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award recipient

Premier is a performance improvement alliance of more than 2,700 U.S. hospitals and 90,000 other sites using the power of collaboration and technology to lead the transformation to coordinated, high-quality, cost-effective care. Owned by hospitals, health systems and other providers, Premier operates a leading healthcare purchasing network with more than $4 billion in annual savings. Premier also maintains the nation's largest clinical, financial and outcomes database with information on 1 in 4 patient discharges. A world leader in delivering measurable improvements in care, Premier works with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. Headquartered in Charlotte, N.C., Premier also has an office in Washington. http://www.premierinc.com. Stay connected with Premier on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.