The Premier healthcare alliance has launched an $86 million “major new strategic plan” that will help hospitals leverage informatics to meet healthcare reform measures – better enabling them to predict reform impact, automate measures reporting and sustain quality and cost improvements in the areas of readmissions, value-based purchasing, infection prevention, waste reduction and harm avoidance.

The funding will be invested over the next three years to expand the data foundation needed to support new models of healthcare delivery that encompass both acute and non-acute care settings, including Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs).

Officials say that intelligence from existing products and tools will be integrated to give 2,300 member hospitals a more complete view into opportunities for further cost containment, care quality and patient safety gains.

“Using our data and collaborative capabilities, hospitals can compare their performance in specific areas, find opportunities for improvement and track the results of their efforts,” Keith J. Figlioli, Premier’s senior vice president of healthcare informatics. “What’s missing in most systems today is integrated information from disparate sources, presented in a way that providers gain actionable insights.”

In reform, safety, productivity, utilization, supply chain efficiency and reimbursement are interrelated, which requires a single, strategic look into performance data. That’s why our investment in this area is so important, he said.

Premier has accumulated patient level information from more than 600 hospitals, with over 309 million hospital visits in its database. The new plan is the next step in Premier’s efforts to evolve its data infrastructure and analytic capabilities to meet next-generation needs.

The informatics data integration plan is expected to:

• Create top performance measures based on reform provisions and make them widely available in the industry.
• Extend data collection and establish standards for non-acute and population-based measurement.
• Ensure data is specific enough to be assessed by condition and by physician practitioner.
• Incorporate measures from Premier collaboratives into products, services and knowledge transfer tools.

“In collaboration with our members, we are setting the pace for the development and execution of top performance in healthcare delivery,” said Premier’s president and CEO Susan DeVore. “Because we are exclusively owned by not-for-profit hospitals and understand that they must work together to transform care delivery, we are making this investment in infrastructure and business intelligence on their behalf to ensure they can survive and thrive under healthcare reform.”