CHARLOTTE, N.C.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Premier, Inc. (NASDAQ: PINC), a leading healthcare improvement company, has been nationally recognized by The Joint Commission and National Quality Forum (NQF) for improving patient safety and healthcare quality through its national quality improvement initiative, QUEST®.
Premier has received the national 2015 John M. Eisenberg Patient Safety and Quality Award. The Joint Commission, the nation’s largest standards-setting and accrediting body in healthcare, and NQF, a leader in improving healthcare quality through measurement, established the annual award to honor John M. Eisenberg, MD, former administrator of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, and member of the founding board of directors for NQF. The award recognizes major national achievements to improve overall healthcare quality by making care patient-centered, reliable, accessible and safe.
QUEST was launched in 2008 to help health systems reliably deliver the most efficient, effective and caring experience for every patient, every single time. Approximately 350 health systems volunteered to transparently share data and define a common framework with consistent measures that would continually set a top performance goal for both participants and the nation. To date, QUEST participants have prevented more than 176,000 deaths, reduced healthcare spending by more than $15 billion and improved readmission rates by 32 percent.
“We created QUEST because nothing like it existed in healthcare. Our members had the care delivery experience, and Premier had the scale needed to pull hundreds of hospitals together and push innovation forward,” said Susan DeVore, president and CEO, Premier. “QUEST participants have proven that better outcomes can result from shared intelligence, solving common challenges, setting new standards, and working together to build a holistic framework to improve patient safety, as well as the quality and cost of care. We’re honored to accept this award on behalf of the QUEST participants that are passionately working to continually improve the health of their communities each day.”
Residing in almost every U.S. state, QUEST participants are large and small, teaching and non-teaching, urban and rural, and high and low disproportionate share hospitals.
Two years ahead of the Affordable Care Act, QUEST was designed to support health systems as they transitioned to a reforming care delivery and payment environment. What began as a test bed for performance improvement, the multidimensional initiative has set national standards of excellence based on increasingly automated measures for readmissions, harm, mortality, patient/family experience, cost and evidence-based care. To achieve these goals, QUEST leverages a proven methodology for performance improvement that enables providers to learn from top performers, share data and outcomes, and accelerate and sustain quality, efficiency and safety innovations across their organizations.
“Premier and the health systems that participate in QUEST have made exceptional achievements in patient safety and healthcare quality,” said Helen Darling, interim president and CEO, NQF. “We can only improve patient safety if we can measure and report on our efforts and the QUEST participants inspire the industry to improve care safety and quality across all settings of care.”
The concept for QUEST’s quality improvement framework was initially introduced as a result of learnings and achievements from the Hospital Quality Incentive Demonstration – the first value-based payment pilot for hospitals launched by Premier and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services in 2003. Anticipating that healthcare would soon move from a fee-for-service to value-base payment system, QUEST has helped prepare health systems for alternative care delivery and payment models, as well as raise the bar for performance improvement across the nation.
About Premier, Inc.
Premier, Inc. (NASDAQ: PINC) is a leading healthcare improvement company, uniting an alliance of approximately 3,600 U.S. hospitals and 120,000 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 and Premier’s blog for more information about the company.
