Premier Says Its Platform Helped U.S. Hospitals Save $11.65 Billion and 136,375 Lives

Over five and a half years, the approximately 350 hospitals that have participated in Premier Inc.’s QUEST collaborative beat national averages for costs and mortality through use of the QUEST methodology and integrated analytics, the Charlotte, N.C., company says. The savings so far have added up to $11.65 billion and 136,375 deaths prevented through evidence-based standardization of health care services, according to its figures.

Premier is a publicly traded company that furnishes services such as integrated data and analytics, collaboratives, and supply chain solutions to more than 2,900 U.S. hospitals and nearly 100,000 other health care providers. The roughly 350 QUEST members use the PremierConnect platform to standardize and share patient data, performance improvement analytics, and evidence-based best practices with one another.

The data is useful because of its size. According to the company, PremierConnect aggregates patient data on one in four U.S. hospital discharges, 2.5 million daily clinical transactions, and approximately $40 billion in annual provider purchases. This allows participating hospitals to see outside their own walls, compare their performance against national averages and use that data to find opportunities for improvement.

"QUEST accelerates quality and cost improvement efforts by creating an open forum to test ideas and scale positive change," stated Harold Berenzweig, M.D., executive vice president at Texas Health Resources, a QUEST member in Arlington, Tex, in the Premier press release. "By comparing our data with others, we can clearly see where performance gaps may exist. We then work together to rethink the status quo way of providing care."

The following achievements of QUEST hospitals were highlighted by Premier:

• The average cost of care at QUEST hospitals has only risen 14 percent since the collaborative started and remained flat for the past year. Nationally, hospital costs have risen 37 percent since 2008.
• The average annual year-over-year cost increase at QUEST hospitals was 2.3 percent, which is only 0.4 percent above the rate of inflation.
• QUEST hospitals had mortality rates 14 percentage points lower than a matched sample of hospitals not in QUEST. Of the deaths avoided, the largest improvements were made in sepsis (21 percent of all deaths prevented), stroke, heart failure and respiratory infections (reduced by 6 percent each).