Report: QUEST hospitals save lives, $11B

While national hospital costs have increased by 37 percent since 2008, costs for hospitals in Premier's QUEST collaborative have risen only 14 percent and remained flat for the past year. QUEST collaborative hospitals also saved approximately $11.65 billion and avoided 136,375 deaths over the past five and a half years using the alliance’s proven methodology and integrated analytics to set new standards of healthcare excellence, according to a report on the collaborative.

Those lower costs at QUEST hospitals would translate to $21 billion in savings last year alone if all U.S. acute-care hospitals met QUEST standards of performance. In addition, QUEST members have made substantial gains in quality, including reducing their 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).

QUEST is a national quality improvement collaborative of approximately 350 hospitals representing almost every state in the country, including all hospitals in Hawaii. Members are large and small, teaching and non-teaching, urban and rural, and high and low disproportionate share hospitals.

“Too often, the healthcare debate centers around the policies needed to incent change,” said Susan DeVore, Premier president and CEO, 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.”

QUEST's measures are publicly available and can be leveraged by any hospital to set quality improvement goals based on aggressive standards of top performance.

This collaborative approach to performance improvement has led to the identification and rapid adoption of best practices to reduce mortality and costs, and improve safety, patient experience, quality and the delivery of evidence-based care, according to the report. These interventions were also successful in preventing 40,808 readmissions since 2011; preventing 17,991 instances of harm, such as hospital-acquired infections, since 2010; and providing approximately 109,851 additional patients with all appropriate, evidence-based care for all the clinical conditions assessed since 2008.