Mercy Health, Ohio’s largest health system, has expanded its relationship with healthcare improvement company Premier. The action follows savings of more than $117 million attributed to supply chain, business intelligence and performance improvement solutions.
This week, Premier announced the two will focus on advancing Mercy’s population health management, with an eye toward improving care for chronically-ill patients.
Mercy Health has more than 450 facilities in Ohio and Kentucky, with assets of $6.1 billion and a net operating revenue of $4.5 billion. The system includes not only hospitals but living sites for the elderly, home health agencies, hospice programs, wellness centers and other healthcare organizations. It is well poised to further tackle issues in healthcare IT after having recently been named one of 2015’s Most Wired health systems—those credited with pushing beyond meaningful use to truly optimize their systems in order to see improvements in performance and patient care.
Mercy Health has worked with Premier for more than 20 years and has one of the company’s most extensive strategic partnerships.
The companies say the partnership generated a savings of more than $117 million, as well as better outcomes, better patient experiences, cost and quality efficiencies and advances in population health.
“Nothing is more important to us than delivering high-quality, cost-effective care to the people we serve across Ohio and Kentucky,” said Michael Connelly, Mercy Health's president and CEO. “Premier’s solutions are important to helping us effectively share information across the continuum, identify opportunities for improvement and target specific interventions to populations in need. This long-standing partnership helps us make lives better and healthcare easier, which is our promise as a ministry.”
As part of the Mercy Health’s move to further improve population health management, it has joined Premier’s integrated pharmacy and care management program, which Premier describes as harnessesing clinical data to drive care for complex patient populations.
Mercy Health and Premier have outlined plans for the future. During the next five years, they intend to continue working together to leverage group purchasing services that will reduce expenses through the aggregation of data, purchasing and best practices. In addition, they plan to implement SaaS analytics and drive additional strategic improvements in the areas of continuum-wide care management, clinical integration and care quality optimization.
The benefits of the partnership will not stop within their walls, they note. Mercy Health plans to share data and best practices with other health systems through Premier’s quality improvement and population health collaboratives.
“Mercy Health is the prime example of what the Premier alliance can accomplish with a highly-engaged, strategic health system partner,” said Michael J. Alkire, Premier's chief operating officer. “Together, we’ve worked to address industry issues hand-in-hand, co-innovating and building new solutions that curb costs, disrupt old practices and break data out of silos.”