Premier's national quality improvement collaborative, QUEST, says it has saved approximately $11.65 billion and prevented 136,375 deaths over the past five years through process improvements and analytics, according to a new whitepaper.
The collaborative launched in 2008 and has grown to include approximately 350 hospitals. Though hospital costs nationwide have increased 37 percent in that time, QUEST hospitals have held cost increases to 14 percent and they've remained flat for the past year, according to an announcement.
At the same time, QUEST is focused on improving care, and its gains have come through identifying areas that need improvement, gaining needed data and developing a systematic plan to tackle them, the paper says.
The paper claims success for also:
- Preventing 40,808 readmissions since 2011.
- Preventing 17,991 instances of harm, such as hospital-acquired infections, since 2010.
"QUEST accelerates quality and cost improvement efforts by creating an open forum to test ideas and scale positive change," said Harold Berenzweig, M.D., executive vice president at Texas Health Resources, a QUEST member in Arlington, Texas. "By comparing our data with others, we can clearly see where performance gaps may exist. We then work together to rethink the status quo way of providing care."
It uses friendly "race to the top" competitions, 90-day "sprints" focused on quickly improving a particular quality measure, focused collaboratives and other methods.
Last year it was reported that members had saved $9.1 billion by reducing infections by sharing data and best practices. Going forward, it has implemented new processes in addition for improving patient experience and other quality measures.
Premier and IBM also teamed up in 2011 to create a platform that allows for data to be more easily transferred between facilities.
Texas Children's Hospital also has focused its quality improvement efforts on use of data, starting with treatment of acute asthma has begun using a similar investigative approach to care for appendectomy, pneumonia and other common cases.
To learn more:
- find the whitepaper
- here's the announcement