Top 10 Healthcare IT Innovators For 2012
September 12, 2012 12:01 AM Among 10 IT teams transforming parts of the U.S. healthcare system, you'll find important lessons in innovation and persistence.
Premier
Premier is a collaborative healthcare alliance of more than 2,600 member hospitals and health systems. In the simplest terms, the purpose of its analytic tool, called Efficiency Dashboard, is to take the waste out of the healthcare system. The dashboard pre-populates hospital-specific data on waste in each of 16 measures, pulled automatically from Premier's clinical, financial, and operational database, which according to Premier, is the nation's largest comparative database, with comprehensive data from one in four hospital admissions. Among the measures: staffing inefficiency, pharmacy overutilization, suboptimal staffing skill mix, excessive length of stay, excessive readmissions, and inappropriate level of care.
Banner Health, a Phoenix-based system with 23 acute care hospitals, uses Premier's database to determine how well it delivers care when compared to top performers. The goal is to develop clinical practice guidelines that can then be adopted across the health system. Premier says that by using its system, Banner is saving:
-- $1.6 million per year through more appropriate use of an abdominal adhesion barrier used in Caesarian sections.
-- $850,000 a year through more appropriate use of CT scans on community-acquired pneumonia patients.
-- $800,000 to $1 million annually by reducing clinical practice variations in bowel surgery.
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