Premier Inc. Earns First Place in AHRQ Predictive Analytics Challenge

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Premier Inc. (NASDAQ: PINC), a leading healthcare improvement company, today announced that the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) has selected it as a first-place winner in the Bringing Predictive Analytics to Healthcare Challenge. To earn this recognition, Premier built a data-driven model that most closely predicted patient admissions and inpatient length of stay given a limited set of data.

The selection by the AHRQ highlights Premier’s advanced data science analytics, clinical intelligence and predictive capabilities, built over the last several decades to deliver actionable and meaningful data to healthcare providers. These capabilities are included within the PremierConnect platform and available in all of the applications that sit on top of it. Premier’s members and life science business partners tap its data analytics daily, deriving business intelligence that shapes their clinical outcomes as well as operational efficiency and overall performance.

“We are honored to receive this recognition from the AHRQ,” said Leigh Anderson, President of Performance Services at Premier. “Premier’s datasets straddle an important intersection in healthcare, allowing us to use deep data analytics to glean insights from disparate data sources with clinical expertise to pinpoint variation, prevent harmful conditions and predict potential issues before they arise.

The purpose of the AHRQ’s Bringing Predictive Analytics to Healthcare Challenge is to explore how predictive analytics may be applied to existing databases to forecast future trends in healthcare utilization and spending. In this challenge, AHRQ requested applicants project patient admissions and inpatient length of stay by county using a provided dataset. County-level data was provided by AHRQ, with Premier adding population demographics, among other characteristics, which came from the area health resource use file (AHRF). Based on Premier’s past experience measuring healthcare outcomes, elements were selected that were thought to be most relevant to predict admissions and inpatient length of stay.

Predictive measures for patient volume and length of stay are important for health systems as they plan for staffing, capacity and resources. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Premier has brought together all of its data and technology capabilities to provide real-time integrated solutions that help make it easier for providers to predict cases and deliver informed, coordinated care. Since the pandemic first appeared in the United States, Premier has been enhancing its solutions to surveil for COVID-19 symptoms and pinpoint hotspots, predict disease progression and surge, determine the supplies necessary to care for the infected population, improve the quality of medical interventions and ultimately prevent the spread of the disease.