Premier Inc. to Present at Carolinas Center for Medical Excellence Quality Symposium; April 19 Session to Address How Hospitals Can Develop a Culture of Quality That Supports Patient Safety.

CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- An expert from the Premier Inc. healthcare alliance will be a featured speaker at The Carolinas Center for Medical Excellence symposium, on Wednesday, April 19 in Columbia, S.C.

Leslie Schultz, Ph.D., CPHQ, Premier's director of Rapid Improvement Programs, is a nationally recognized expert in documenting and sharing reliable, evidence-based best practices among hospitals. Schultz's session, "The Quality Connection to Patient Safety," will describe ways in which hospitals can develop the culture of quality need to support patient safety.

Schultz will discuss findings from Premier's groundbreaking pay for performance Hospital Quality Incentive Demonstration (HQID) project with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). The first national project of its kind, HQID was designed to determine if economic incentives to hospitals are effective at improving the quality of inpatient care.

Through site visits and meetings with top-performing hospitals, Premier has documented the ways in which those hospitals create a culture of quality. More than 250 hospitals across 38 states voluntarily participate in the demonstration project, which uses Premier's Perspective(TM) database, the largest clinical comparative database in the nation, to track hospitals' performance.

Launched in July of 2003, the three-year demonstration uses a widely accepted set of quality measures to evaluate individual hospital performance. In year one of the demonstration, approximately 235 acute myocardial infarction (heart attack) patients were saved as a result of quality improvements in that related focus area alone.

CMS, the federal agency providing healthcare coverage to approximately 40 million Americans, awarded $8.85 million in Medicare incentives to the top-performing hospitals in the first year of the project. 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.

Premier recently released a white paper documenting the project's first year. According to the white paper, which is available at www.premierinc.com/qualitydemo, participating hospitals improved quality an average of 6.6 percent across the clinical areas studied. These performance gains outpaced those of hospitals involved in other national performance initiatives. Mean quality scores for project participants on 17 key quality indicators are nearly 10 points higher on a 100-point scale than mean quality scores for the nation's hospitals as a whole, based on analysis of publicly reported data.

About The Carolinas Center for Medical Excellence

The Carolinas Center for Medical Excellence (CCME), formerly known as Medical Review of North Carolina, Inc., (MRNC), is a physician-sponsored, nonprofit healthcare quality improvement organization. CCME has been designated by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) as the Quality Improvement Organization (QIO) for North and South Carolina. With input from the medical community, CCME develops cooperative quality improvement projects on clinical topics affecting seniors in the Carolinas. These projects measure how effectively healthcare providers utilize proven treatment paths and develop improvement plans to improve care. CCME also provides utilization review services for Medicaid state agencies in North and South Carolina to ensure that Medicaid patients are receiving the best possible care. Please visit www.mrnc.org for more information.

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 38,500 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; Chicago, IL; and Washington, DC. For more information, visit www.premierinc.com.