Salem Hospital Selects Premier Inc. As Its Quality Improvement Partner to Enable Top Clinical Performance.

Premier's Clinical Advisor[TM] Assists Hospitals with Quality Measurement, Benchmarking and Regulatory Reporting, Improving Patient Outcomes While Reducing Costs

CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- Salem Hospital Regional Health Services, a not-for-profit organization in Salem, Oregon, has signed an agreement with the Premier Inc. healthcare alliance to use Premier's Clinical Advisor[TM] for quality measurement, benchmarking and regulatory reporting.

Salem Hospital selected Clinical Advisor to further enhance its ongoing commitment to provide the very best care for its patients while safely reducing associated costs.

"The ability to risk-adjust outcomes data and to benchmark performance against peer hospitals were strong motivators in our selection of Clinical Advisor," said Daniel Grigg, performance improvement director at Salem. "We are committed to achieving clinical quality second to none and view Clinical Advisor as an important tool to reach that goal."

Clinical Advisor offers benchmarking, analysis, consulting, knowledge-sharing and other customized services to help hospitals and health systems close performance gaps identified through use of comparative data on patient outcomes, cost and clinical resource utilization.

With Clinical Advisor, hospitals can:

* Prioritize quality improvement efforts and set measurable goals;

* Improve financial performance through service line analysis;

* Achieve regulatory compliance with a single solution for submitting quality measures;

* Formalize physician feedback with presentation-ready reports;

* Identify misuse by analyzing utilization of resources, down to the transaction level; and

* Employ nationally-recognized 3M[TM] APR-DRG severity and risk adjustment methodologies.

"Salem Hospital Regional Health Services brings a wealth of knowledge about delivering high quality that will benefit all participants in the Clinical Advisor program," said Stephanie Alexander, senior vice president and general manager for Premier Healthcare Informatics. "Salem Hospital is widely recognized as a provider of high quality care, and we look forward to helping them achieve their clinical quality improvement goals so they can better serve their patients."

Clinical Advisor is part of the Premier Advisor Suite[TM], the healthcare industry's leading integrated benchmarking, reporting and surveillance solution for improving quality, safety, labor productivity, and operational and supply costs. Clinical Advisor and the Advisor Suite are powered by Perspective[TM], the largest integrated clinical, financial and operational comparative database in the nation, providing patient-level detail to identify opportunities for improvement in clinical quality and efficiency.

About Salem Hospital Regional Health Services

Salem Hospital Regional Health Services is one of the largest of Oregon's 57 acute-care hospitals. It is a not-for-profit hospital, licensed for 454 acute care beds, and is guided by the 15-member volunteer Board of Trustees. There are 594 physicians on the medical staff, representing 46 different specialties, who admit patients to the hospital. Salem is the city's largest private employer, with approximately 3,500 full- and part-time employees. For more information, visit www.salemhospital.org.

About Premier Inc., recipient of the 2006 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award 

Serving 1,700 hospitals and 43,000 other healthcare sites, Premier Inc. is the largest healthcare alliance in the United States dedicated to improving patient outcomes while safely reducing the cost of care. Owned by not-for-profit hospitals, Premier operates the nation's largest healthcare purchasing network, the most comprehensive repository of hospital clinical and financial information and one of the largest policy-holder owned, hospital professional liability risk-retention groups in healthcare. Headquartered in San Diego, Premier has offices in Charlotte, N.C. and Washington, D.C. For more information, visit www.premierinc.com.