Healthcare Alliance Experts to Discuss Pay-for-Performance and Advocacy in March

Leaders from the Premier healthcare alliance will speak at conferences around the country in March, sharing exclusive insights regarding the company's 2006 Baldrige Award, along with pay-for-performance and patient safety based on Premier's Hospital Quality Incentive Demonstration (HQID) pay-for-performance project with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).

Premier President and CEO Richard A. Norling will discuss Premier's Baldrige Award as a keynote speaker at the Association for Corporate Growth San Diego Growth Trends Conference 2007 on Thursday, March 22 in San Diego. Norling will also be a keynote speaker at the S&P Institute meeting on Thursday, March 29 in Orlando, Fla., where he will discuss the HQID project.

Premier Senior Vice President of Public Affairs Blair Childs will cover healthcare advocacy issues at the Heartland Health 2007 Regional Hospital Board of Directors Conference on Saturday, March 3 in St. Joseph, MO.

Stephanie Alexander, senior vice president for Premier Healthcare Informatics, will discuss the relationship between cost and quality at the Healthcare Financial Management Association (HFMA) seminar on Wednesday, March 7 in Baltimore, MD.

Premier Corporate Vice President Margaret Reagan, along with representatives from CMS and the American Hospital Association, will speak at the Women in Government Relations Physician and Hospital Update on Tuesday, March 6 in Washington, D.C., regarding value-based purchasing.

The HQID is the first national project of its kind, designed to determine if economic incentives to hospitals are effective at improving the quality of inpatient care. As part of the project, more than 250 hospitals submit clinical quality data to Premier through the Perspective data warehouse. CMS, which approved a three-year extension of the project in February, then uses the data to identify and reward top performers in five clinical areas.

According to official Year 2 results from the project, released in January, participating hospitals raised overall quality by 11.8 percent in two years in the five clinical areas studied. That meant better care and outcomes for more than 800,000 patients. Improvements in quality of care over the first two years of the demonstration project saved 1,284 acute myocardial infarction (heart attack) patients, and patients received approximately 150,000 additional recommended evidence-based clinical quality measures or procedures, such as smoking cessation, detailed discharge instructions and pneumococcal vaccination.