Premier is first company allowed access to CMS data

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has granted Premier access to its Virtual Research Data Center (VRDC) to develop innovations that drive healthcare transformation.

Premier is the first organization to conduct Innovator Research using the VRDC, a virtual research environment, and will derive insights from privacy-protected Medicare data that are expected to result in the development of solutions to benefit patients and the healthcare system overall.

“Being approved to use the CMS VRDC signifies our leadership in creating innovative solutions to improve patient care,” said Wes Champion, senior vice president of Premier Performance Partners. “Access to the VRDC will allow Premier to calculate timelier performance measures than currently available and identify additional opportunity areas to help move healthcare performance improvement further, faster.”

CMS began accepting requests from innovators and entrepreneurs in September 2015 to conduct approved research that will ultimately improve care and provide better tools to benefit healthcare consumers. Previously, commercial entities were denied access to CMS data for these purposes.

As part of its approved research, Premier Insights, one of Premier’s research and analytics divisions, will seek to use additional data to identify interventions that drive quality improvement and cost containment. In doing so, Premier will analyze episodes of care across the continuum to determine clinical best practices that provide the greatest improvements in care and reductions in costs. Premier members will receive reports containing these benchmarks and findings to integrate into their care transformation efforts. Premier will then seek to determine whether these reports in addition to its other collaborative methodologies enable its members to outperform others.

Premier will publish its key findings to assist other providers and form the basis for future measures and performance improvement solutions offered through Premier’s quality cycle management collaboratives, data analytics and consulting services.