Baystate Health Selects Premier, Inc. to Support Health Informatics & Technology Innovation Center

CHARLOTTE, N.C., Aug. 21, 2014 -- Baystate Health of Springfield, Mass., has selected Premier, Inc.'s (Nasdaq:PINC) data warehouse and business intelligence platform, PremierConnect(R) Enterprise, to support the development of innovative solutions within its new Health Informatics & Technology Innovation Center.

Home to Western Massachusetts' largest health insurance company and a flagship academic medical center, Baystate Health received a $5.5 million grant from the state last year to build the Baystate Health Innovation Center. The Innovation Center, which will officially launch this fall, is designed to connect healthcare information technology (HIT) vendors with physicians and other providers of care at Baystate Health to co-develop innovative solutions to the rapidly changing healthcare environment.

Baystate Health has been a member of Premier and its predecessor companies for 30 years, leveraging both its performance and supply chain services. Last fall, the health system deployed PremierConnect Enterprise to quickly and more efficiently access, integrate and interpret its clinical, financial and operational data. Seeing the positive results, the Innovation Center signed a separate, multi-year agreement to use PremierConnect Enterprise to integrate payer, provider and other healthcare data from participating innovators within a structured collaborative environment. By leveraging PremierConnect Enterprise's platform and unique healthcare data model, innovators will easily access and manipulate data for testing and scaling new HIT solutions.

"Our goal is to grow innovative solutions for the very real challenges of healthcare today in collaboration with innovators from around the globe," said Joel Vengco, vice president and chief information officer, Baystate Health. "This long-term partnership with Premier provides us
with the infrastructure and capabilities necessary to liberate healthcare data within an open workspace that a broad group of researchers, innovators and providers can access. The platform and data combined will allow us to accelerate new HIT solutions that improve the quality and efficiency of patient care."

The Innovation Center resources will be available for select innovators working on solutions that support new healthcare models, beyond the use of electronic health records (EHRs), to better manage population health, value-based care and the revenue cycle. PremierConnect Enterprise is a cloud-based service managed by Premier. It will support this work through its multifaceted platform that combines data warehousing with the ability to acquire, standardize, transform and integrate big data, produce actionable analytics and garner predictive insights.

"Baystate Health is a model health system with a strong footprint in leading research across the critical areas of healthcare quality and outcomes," said Michael J. Alkire, chief operating officer, Premier. "Premier is proud to be a part of the next-generation work of the Innovation Center and its innovators at such a crucial time, as we chisel away the silos in healthcare."

Keith J. Figlioli, Premier senior vice president of healthcare informatics and member of the Office of the National Coordinator's Health IT Standards Committee, said, "This collaboration is vital to the creation of flexible HIT resources and infrastructures that bring the best ideas from the brightest minds to reality more quickly, and spread them across our industry."

PremierConnect Enterprise includes expert advisory services and membership in the Data Alliance Collaborative. The Data Alliance Collaborative is a group of the nation's leading health systems, including Baystate Health, that share knowledge and assets to accelerate the development of the analytics and business intelligence needed to improve population health and operational performance. The Innovation Center provides a new way for collaborative participants to work with innovators to test potential solutions that advance value-based care. These solutions are expected to have a direct path toward the possible adoption of HIT best practices across Premier's alliance of 3,000 hospitals and 110,000 other providers.

The value of the contracts was not disclosed. Premier expects its expanded relationship with the Baystate Health Innovation Center to contribute to fiscal 2015 revenue and earnings. With the addition of the Innovation Center, Premier now has nine healthcare organizations leveraging its PremierConnect Enterprise services.

About Baystate Health

Based in western Massachusetts, Baystate Health is a not-for-profit healthcare organization serving over 750,000 people throughout western New England. Services include an academic medical center, community hospitals, medical practices, homecare and hospice, and the insurer Health New England. Baystate Health has a total of 824 beds across four facilities: Baystate Medical Center, the western campus of Tufts University School of Medicine, in Springfield; Baystate Children's Hospital, also in Springfield; Baystate Franklin Medical Center in Greenfield; and Baystate Mary Lane Hospital in Ware. Visit www.baystatehealth.org or www.baystateinnovation.org.

About Premier, Inc.

Premier, Inc. (Nasdaq:PINC) is a leading healthcare improvement company, uniting an alliance of more than 3,000 U.S. hospitals and more than 110,000 other providers to transform healthcare. With integrated data and analytics, collaboratives, supply chain solutions, and advisory and other services, Premier enables better care and outcomes at a lower cost. Premier, a Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award recipient, plays a critical role in the rapidly evolving healthcare industry, collaborating with members to co-develop long-term innovations that reinvent and improve the way care is delivered to patients nationwide. Headquartered in Charlotte, N.C., Premier is passionate about transforming American healthcare. Please visit Premier's news and investor sites on www.premierinc.com; as well as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, Foursquare and Premier's blog for more information about the company.

Forward-looking statements

Matters discussed in this release that are not statements of historical or current facts, such as the Baystate Health Innovation Center's continued use of Premier's supply chain and performance services at current or expanded levels, as discussed herein, are "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements may involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause the actual results, performance or achievements of Premier to be materially different from historical results or from any future results or projections expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on any forward looking statements. In addition to statements that explicitly describe such risks and uncertainties, readers are urged to consider statements in the conditional or future tenses or that include terms such as
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expectations as to future events and trends affecting its business and are necessarily subject to uncertainties, many of which are outside Premier's control. More information on potential factors that could affect Premier's financial results is included from time to time in the "Forward Looking Statements," "Risk Factors" and "Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations" sections of Premier's periodic and current filings with the SEC, as well as those discussed under the "Risk Factors" and "Forward Looking Statements" section of Premier's IPO Prospectus, dated September 25, 2013, filed with the SEC and available on Premier's website at investors.premierinc.com. Forward looking statements speak only as of the date they are made. Premier undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise that occur after that date.