Professional Documents
Culture Documents
surgery
Contact: Ken Inchausti
Premier Corporate Communications
704.733.5586 or kenneth_inchausti@premierinc.com
KANSAS CITY, MO (April 3, 2001) – More than 200 healthcare professionals from the
Premier alliance gathered here to build strategies to improve the quality of
healthcare in chronic conditions emerging as threats to the health of an aging
America.
"At Premier, our focus is to make performance excellence consistent within the
clinical setting," said Jack Cox, MD, MMM, senior vice president, Premier Clinical
Innovations. "As America ages, healthcare professionals are going to face an
increasing number of serious conditions. Patient care will improve when healthcare
professionals find new pathways to enhancing clinical quality, safety, and cost."
Spine surgery clinical initiative: Between 600,000 and 700,000 spine surgical
procedures take place each year in the United States. Post surgical infection
rates, depending on procedure, impact between one and six percent of all patients.
Participating hospitals will aim for providing prophylactic antibiotics within one
hour prior to incision.
Collaboration is key to the success of the initiatives. Over the next 12 months,
hospitals will be sharing milestones, leveraging data derived from Premier
Healthcare Informatics Perspective data set, the nation’s largest clinical data
warehouse, and learning from top performing hospitals from within the Premier
network. This collaborative approach mirrors the breakthrough strategy initially
deployed by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, a Premier strategic partner.
"Mission St. Joseph’s work illustrates the correlation between quality and cost,"
continued Dr. Cox. "Since they’ve devoted their efforts to improving their
systems, the hospital has become a national leader in performing surgery."
In the stroke initiative, hospitals heard from Stanly Memorial Hospital, another
North Carolina medical center. Medical staff created a broad-based awareness
campaign to educate rural residents about the seriousness of stroke. Emergency
department staff, neurologists, and family physicians work in concert to reduce
time to treatment when stroke patients arrive in the hospital. As a result of
their process improvement efforts, Stanly has increased the number of patients
receiving a life-saving clot-busting drug, tPA, to 10 percent of their stroke
patients. The documented national average is four percent.
Bedside technology was central to the adverse drug event update hosted for the 95
participating hospitals. A Premier hospital in the Pacific Northwest placed four
of these computers in the rooms of eight patients who were in a cardiac step down
unit for seven days last year. The computer system, produced by Premier business
partner, Bridge Medical, replaced the patients’ traditional Medication
Administration Record. As doctors issued orders in real time and nurses and
pharmacists followed the orders during the week, the computers issued 250 warning
messages and recorded 105 medical errors.
Upcoming focus areas for the Clinical Performance Initiatives include community
acquired pneumonia, hip and knee replacement, drug utilization, and blood product
utilization.
About Premier
Premier, Inc., is a strategic alliance in U. S. healthcare, owned by more than 200
of the nation’s leading hospital and healthcare systems. Aggregately, these
systems operate or are affiliated with more than 1,800 hospital facilities in 50
states and hundreds of other care sites. Premier provides an array of resources
supporting health services delivery. Among these resources are comprehensive
supply chain management services, including group purchasing for more than $12
billion annually in supplies and equipment, with e-commerce enablement by
medibuy.com. Other resources offered by Premier are insurance programs,
performance improvement services of many kinds including healthcare informatics,
clinical technology services, and physician practice management services. Premier
is headquartered in San Diego, Calif., with other major facilities in Chicago,
Ill., and Charlotte, N.C. Advocacy and policy offices are located in Washington,
D.C. For more information, visit
http://web.archive.org/web/20021124052510/http://www.premierinc.com/.
# # #