Premier Inc. Executives to Present at National Events in August; Discussions Include National Pay for Performance Project With CMS.

CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- Leaders from the Premier Inc. healthcare alliance will speak at conferences around the nation in August, with presentations focusing on Premier's Hospital Quality Incentive Demonstration (HQID) project with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).

Premier President and CEO Richard A. Norling will discuss the latest information from Premier's HQID project with CMS at the Fourth Annual World Congress Leadership Summit on Healthcare Quality and Pay for Performance on Monday, August 7 in Boston, MA.

In addition, Stephanie Alexander, senior vice president and general manager of Premier Healthcare Informatics, and Leslie Schultz, Ph.D., CPHQ, director of Premier Rapid Improvement Programs, will speak at the Harvard Quality Colloquium in Cambridge, MA.

Schultz will discuss Premier's Patient Safety Tool Kit on Sunday, August 20, while Alexander will discuss the HQID project in terms of pay for performance return on investment on Monday, August 21.

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. More than 250 hospitals are voluntarily participating. The project uses Premier's Perspective(TM) database, the largest clinical comparative database in the nation, to track hospitals' performance.

In year one of the demonstration, CMS awarded $8.85 million in incentives to the top-performing hospitals in the project. In addition, CMS-validated data from the first year of the HQID demonstrates a significant improvement in the quality of care across five clinical focus areas as measured by 33 nationally standardized and widely accepted quality indicators. The average improvement across the clinical areas was 6.6 percent. These performance gains have outpaced those of hospitals involved in other national performance initiatives. Approximately 235 acute myocardial infarction (heart attack) patients were saved as a result of quality improvements in that related focus area alone.

In addition, Premier recently released an analysis partially based on the HQID project, stating that, if all pneumonia and heart bypass patients nationally had received most of a set of basic, widely accepted care measures in 2004, costs would have been as much as $1 billion lower. Other projected outcomes associated with this improved process delivery include 3,000 fewer deaths, 6,000 fewer complications, 6,000 fewer readmissions and 500,000 fewer days in the hospital.

About Premier Inc.

Premier Inc., helps hospitals accelerate performance on both clinical outcomes and supply chain costs. Premier is a healthcare alliance entirely owned by more than 200 of the nation's leading not-for-profit hospitals and healthcare systems. These organizations operate or are affiliated with nearly 1,500 hospitals and more than 41,000 other healthcare sites. Premier Purchasing Partners provides an array of services supporting health services delivery including group purchasing totaling more than $25 billion annually in supplies and equipment purchasing, as well as supply chain and clinical performance improvement services. Premier Healthcare Informatics offers performance measurement, benchmarking, and reporting products and advisory services supporting quality improvement. Premier Insurance Management Services helps hospitals manage insurance costs and improve risk management and claims capabilities. Headquartered in San Diego, CA, Premier has offices in Charlotte, NC, and Washington, DC. For more information, visit www.premierinc.com.