Premier healthcare alliance, Phytel Helping Providers Efficiently Coordinate Ambulatory Care and Better Engage Patients to Keep People Healthy

CHARLOTTE, N.C.--The Premier healthcare alliance has partnered with Phytel to automate population health services, helping health systems deliver safer and lower-cost care across the continuum.

“Combining Premier and Phytel information, providers will access a full suite of automated population health intelligence to eliminate variation, increase patient engagement, improve care coordination and keep people healthy across the inpatient and outpatient continuum.”

A comprehensive population health suite allows providers to manage patient care more efficiently, with a better understanding of outcomes and total cost. This emphasizes care delivered outside the hospital using predictive analytics to profile an entire population, not just those who have been treated. The intelligence garnered can more effectively support emerging care delivery and risk management models through health reform as providers participating in accountable care organizations (ACOs) are reimbursed based on quality and cost overall.

Medicare Shared Savings Program ACO participant Thomas Auer, MD, CEO of Bon Secours Virginia Medical Group, a Premier member and Phytel solution user, said, “Phytel helps us to improve the quality of preventive and chronic care by identifying patients with gaps in treatment and re-engaging them with their providers. This partnership further provides Premier alliance members with the right set of tools to thrive through reform, and ultimately improve the long-term health outcomes of and engagement from the people we serve.”

“The integration of technologies that deliver real-time, predictive decision support is integral for disease and care management, and system-wide quality improvement,” said Keith J. Figlioli, Premier senior vice president of healthcare informatics. “Combining Premier and Phytel information, providers will access a full suite of automated population health intelligence to eliminate variation, increase patient engagement, improve care coordination and keep people healthy across the inpatient and outpatient continuum.”

Premier, an alliance of 2,800 hospitals and 93,000 other care sites, integrates payor, provider and supply chain data in healthcare’s largest technology and social networking platform, PremierConnect™, an industry first. The platform links providers nationwide with EHR patient data on 1 in 4 U.S. hospital discharges, evidence-based best practices from 2.5 million daily clinical transactions, $40 billion worth of annual purchasing data, and each other.

Phytel, the leader in automated, ambulatory provider-led population health improvement, aggregates data from electronic health records, lab systems, and information exchanges across more than 30 million patients.

"By integrating the capabilities of Phytel and Premier, providers can go beyond analytics to scale patient care to the population level, bridging the gap between caring for individual patients and assuming responsibility for the health of an entire patient population," said Steve Schelhammer, CEO of Phytel. "Accomplishing that requires not only clinical data on care gaps, inefficiencies or at-risk patients, but also automated tools that can be deployed to assist care teams with engaging patients and driving improved outcomes.”

Premier’s clinically integrated population health suite includes PopulationAdvisor™, NetworkAdvisor™ and PhysicianFocus™, which blend claims and clinical information in PremierConnect to help providers understand practice variations, highlight successes and improve performance across the continuum. Alliance members use the platform to benchmark, compare, analyze and integrate detailed data, while connecting with each other through social communities.

Phytel solutions have achieved prevalidation status from the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA), meaning providers will be able to obtain autocredit toward 2011 patient-centered medical home criteria through the partnership.

Placing third for healthcare technology innovations on the 2012 InformationWeek 500 list, Premier was also the sole recipient of IBM’s 2012 CTO Innovation Award.

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

Premier is the nation’s largest performance improvement alliance of more than 2,800 U.S. hospitals and 93,000 other sites using the power of collaboration and technology to lead the transformation to coordinated, high-quality, cost-effective care. Owned by healthcare providers, Premier operates a leading purchasing network with more than $5 billion in annual savings. Premier also maintains clinical, financial and outcomes databases based on 1 in every 4 patient discharges. A world leader in measurably improving patient care, Premier has the largest performance improvement collaboratives in America, including one in partnership with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. Headquartered in Charlotte, N.C., Premier also has an office in Washington. https://www.premierinc.com. Stay connected with Premier on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

About Phytel

Phytel empowers physician-led population health improvement and provides physicians with proven technology to deliver timely, coordinated care to their patients. Phytel's state-of-the-art registry, which now encompasses more than 30 million patients nationwide, uses evidence-based chronic and preventive care protocols to identify and notify patients due for service, while tracking compliance and measuring quality and financial results. For more information, please visit www.phytel.com. Follow us on Twitter and find us on Facebook.