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Premier Inc. (NASDAQ: PINC), a healthcare improvement company, is working with 10 leading hospitals on a new collaborative designed to ensure every mother and baby born in the U.S. receives the safest care possible.

Over the next two years, hospitals in Premier’s perinatal collaborative will design, test and adopt evidenced-based improvement strategies, such as industry-endorsed maternal safety care bundles, that can be replicated, standardized and scaled nationally. The collaborative, which launched in June, is part of Premier’s Bundle of Joy™ Campaign to transform the quality, safety and cost of maternal and infant health (perinatal health).

“Our work with providers to improve care for women and infants remains a key area of focus as we aim to create a healthier delivery system,” said Susan DeVore, Premier CEO. “We know firsthand what can be accomplished by acting as a convener to facilitate collaboration, data sharing and the development of scalable solutions. Using integrated technology and our years of working with health systems to achieve safer, more cost-effective care, our goal is to measurably close the gap between the evidence and what is practiced by testing and adopting new delivery models that elevate the quality of perinatal care.”

The overarching goals of the perinatal collaborative are to reach zero preventable maternal and neonatal harm and deaths by increasing the delivery of national industry standards. Participants will focus on reducing mortality and disparities in care, preventing adverse events, ensuring patients are treated in the correct and most appropriate setting, increasing the delivery of evidence-based care, enhancing patient and family engagement, and improving the overall health of women and newborns. Premier will support collaborative participants using its nationally recognized performance improvement methodology, which is based on national data and peer-to-peer benchmarking, and the sharing and scaling of successful improvement strategies and solutions.

The following participating hospitals are also owners of the American Excess Insurance Exchange (AEIX) reciprocal risk retention group, a captive professional liability insurance company that is managed by Premier.

  • Baptist Health Lexington, KY
  • Baystate Medical Center, Springfield, MA
  • Franklin Woods Community Hospital, Johnson City, TN
  • MemorialCare Miller Children’s & Women’s Hospital Long Beach, CA
  • PeaceHealth Sacred Heart Medical Center at RiverBend, Springfield, OR
  • Presbyterian Hospital, Albuquerque, NM
  • Riverside Regional Medical Center, Newport News, VA
  • Summa Health, Akron, OH
  • Texas Health Harris Methodist Hospital Fort Worth, TX
  • West Virginia University Medicine – Camden Clark Medical Center, Parkersburg, WV

“This group’s unique, combined expertise is critical in providing the leading pathway for managing risk and improving perinatal safety,” said Barclay E. Berdan, FACHE, CEO of Texas Health Resources and Chairperson of the AEIX Board of Directors. “We are excited to be collaborating with Premier in its mission to improve the health of communities. We will work together to establish a systemwide model of care, including a culture of safety, high reliability and teamwork that supports sustainable improvements.”

Specifically, Premier experts will be paired onsite with participants to establish multidisciplinary, data-driven improvement initiatives to transform perinatal care design by:

  • Assessing, measuring and monitoring each participant’s culture of safety and its impact on quality and cost, including liability expenses;
  • Identifying strengths and opportunities that can be converted into an improvement framework with actionable, sustainable practices;
  • Supporting networking and learning through webinars, in-person events and continuing education activities;
  • Analyzing population-focused outcomes measures for maternal/neonatal safety bundles, services and harm using two years of baseline data and peer benchmarks – this includes careful examination of each organization’s inpatient and outpatient obstetric and neonatal service areas;
  • Providing quarterly results on targeted perinatal services through a proprietary perinatal dashboard, pulling information from the PremierConnect® performance improvement platform, which houses data on 1.2 million annual births; and
  • Delivering an annual weighted roadmap of improvement based on onsite assessments to support the journey to sustaining high reliability in perinatal care.

The collaborative builds on the learnings and successes gleaned from Premier’s years of work with hundreds of hospitals and key industry associations on women and infant safety guidelines development, education and implementation. This includes the Premier Perinatal Safety Initiative, which united a group of hospitals and helped them reduce maternal deaths and harm by 20 percent from 2008-2013.

Premier plans to broadly share and publish learnings from the collaborative, as well as scale proven innovations and provide additional support and focus, in its next iteration of the QUEST® quality improvement collaborative in January 2020.