Kings Mountain Hospital Selects Premier Healthcare Alliance

CHARLOTTE, N.C. - Kings Mountain Hospital, an affiliate of the Carolinas HealthCare System, has signed an agreement with the Premier healthcare alliance to use Premier’s Quality Measures Reporter™ to enhance clinical quality and efficiency and meet compliance needs, enabling hospitals to easily analyze the effect of quality measures on patient outcomes and cost.

Premier’s QMR is a single-source solution that allows hospitals to collect, submit and analyze data to measure clinical quality for compliance with regulatory agencies, such as The Joint Commission and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).

“We are pleased to join several of the other Carolinas HealthCare System hospitals that have achieved numerous successes utilizing Premier products,” said Liz Popwell, FACHE, vice president of Systems Management for Cleveland County Healthcare System, part of the Carolinas HealthCare System. “Quality measures go through a process of endorsement from the National Quality Forum (NQF), and hospitals must then submit data on no less than three of five clinical populations to JCAHO and CMS. We look forward to implementing QMR at Kings Mountain to assist us with meeting these compliance achievements.”

Powered by Premier’s Perspective™ database, the most comprehensive clinical, financial and operational comparative database in the nation, QMR allows for benchmarking against normative values, user-defined peer groups and industry top performers.

“Premier is thrilled to have the opportunity to work with Kings Mountain and to further our relationship with the Carolinas HealthCare System,” said Stephanie Alexander, senior vice president and general manager for Premier Healthcare Informatics. “Like Kings Mountain, the majority of hospitals in the United States are required by The Joint Commission and CMS to collect and submit data on measures of clinical quality. These quality measures provide the basis to compare the standard of quality across hospitals through projects such as Premier’s Hospital Quality Incentive Demonstration (HQID) with CMS.”

The HQID is the first national project of its kind, designed to determine if economic incentives to hospitals are effective at improving the quality of inpatient care. As part of the project, more than 260 hospitals submit clinical quality data to Premier through the Perspective data warehouse. CMS, which approved a three-year extension of the project in February, then uses the data to identify and reward top performers in five clinical areas.

According to official Year 2 results from the project, released in January, participating hospitals raised overall quality by 11.8 percent in two years in the five clinical areas studied. That meant better care and outcomes for more than 800,000 patients. Improvements in quality of care over the first two years of the demonstration project saved 1,284 acute myocardial infarction (heart attack) patients, and patients received approximately 150,000 additional recommended evidence-based clinical quality measures or procedures, such as smoking cessation, detailed discharge instructions and pneumococcal vaccination.

Premier’s QMR tool is integrated into the Premier Performance Suite™, which includes benchmarking, reporting analysis and real-time surveillance of clinical, safety, financial, operational, labor productivity and supply data. QMR captures and reports on more data at the physician and nursing unit level than any existing product. It enables hospitals to track performance against national benchmarks and identify performance opportunities to increase clinical quality and efficiency.

About Carolinas HealthCare System