Premier Inc. Launches QUEST® 2020

CHARLOTTE, N.C. (June 21, 2016) — Premier Inc. (NASDAQ: PINC), a leading healthcare improvement company, has announced a new initiative to accelerate effective value-based care delivery practices across health systems.

QUEST^® 2020 builds on the legacy of Premier’s nationally-recognized QUEST collaborative, a quality improvement initiative launched in 2008 to help hospitals prepare for alternative payment models and provide high-value care across U.S. communities. The new program leverages learnings from QUEST and extends beyond hospital walls to provide compliance, improvement and specialized support for health systems to thrive in today’s healthcare economy.

“Healthcare’s progression toward requiring alternative payment models presents a new dynamic reality to address,” said Susan DeVore, president and CEO of Premier. “QUEST 2020 is a next generation model designed to help health systems meet and exceed performance demands as compliance and regulatory measures continue to evolve. It’s the result of leading providers that prepared themselves for today’s environment and now need a quality improvement program that expands into the continuum to be ready for tomorrow.”

QUEST 2020 is a three-year program to inspire, support and guide health systems in embracing their skills to transform the design, quality and performance of care delivery by connecting them with peers, evidence-based practices and data. The program is fully aligned with the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s National Quality Strategy to provide better, more affordable care for individuals and the community. A key feature of QUEST 2020 is helping all provider stakeholders understand and comply with federal reimbursement requirements, such as the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act and the Merit-based Incentive Payment System. The program officially activates in January 2017 as new policies for physicians and post-acute care providers begin assessing performance to determine value-based payment.

“Today, providers are expected to navigate the maze of new regulations and legislative mandates while implementing best practices to reduce costs and improve quality, and juggling the adoption of operating capabilities to accommodate the transition to value-based models,” said Teri Sholder, chief quality officer at Kettering Health Network, which serves southwest Ohio and plans to participate in QUEST 2020. “QUEST has been a crucial part of the progress we’ve made in becoming a population health leader. For example, as a participant in QUEST, we improved patient safety by 36 percent across all six of our hospitals. We’re excited to join QUEST 2020 and build on what we’ve learned as we extend our performance improvement work beyond acute care.”

QUEST 2020 participants will share acute, ambulatory and community health data to set national standards for care delivery improvement. The program aims to drive improvement across six priority areas: safety, communication and care coordination, affordable care, person and family experience, health and wellbeing, and prevention and treatment. In addition, QUEST 2020 provides three entry points based on participant needs.

• Compliance: Translate and comply with complex legislative implications, as well as regulatory reporting and programmatic requirements, and take advantage of opportunities.
• Improvement: Enhance performance by integrating and effectively analyzing ambulatory, community and quality data.
• Specialized: Engage a broad scope of stakeholders outside the quality department and beyond hospital walls to solve targeted service line challenges.

Built from learnings gleaned from the Premier and Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Hospital Quality Incentive Demonstration, which focused payment on reporting, QUEST’s approximately 350 hospitals saved approximately 176,000 lives and $15 billion, improved readmission rates by 32 percent and proved they outperform non-QUEST hospitals in mortality. QUEST was nationally recognized by The Joint Commission and National Quality Forum for improving patient safety and healthcare quality. An article about QUEST appears in the June 2016 edition of The Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety.

Premier 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.