Published on 25-Jan-2012
"The high-value skills and healthcare industry expertise IBM and Perficient brought to this project increased the quality and effectiveness of our solution and accelerated its delivery." - Denise Hatzidakis, chief technology officer, Premier healthcare alliance
Customer:
Premier Inc
Industry:
Healthcare
Deployment country:
United States
Solution:
Business Process Management (BPM)
IBM Business Partner:
Perficient
Overview
Owned by hospitals and health systems, the Premier healthcare alliance serves more than 2,500 hospitals and 78,000 non-acute care sites in the United States.
Business need:
Premier sought to standardize previously segregated data and provide alliancewide access to it while ensuring data security. This effort posed a significant process management and IT challenge, but it's a critical one for Premier as the organization seeks to analyze, compare and improve performance across its network of member hospitals.
Solution:
With IBM as its technology and service provider—along with IBM Partner Perficient, Inc.—Premier is building an integrated infrastructure that allows its membership to access and apply industry best practices, actionable information and workflow-related business rules, both on the business and clinical sides of its operations.
Premier is using IBM WebSphere® ILOG® and IBM WebSphere Lombardi Edition software as the foundation of its centralized, interactive information distribution platform.
Benefits:
The soluiton reduces healthcare-related costs by virtue of systemic process improvements and evidence-based care and drives continuous improvement in patient care through greater data access, standardization and analytics.
Case Study
IBM WebSphere business rules and process management tools support business and clinical improvements
Owned by hospitals and health systems, the Premier healthcare alliance serves more than 2,500 hospitals and 78,000 non-acute care sites in the United States. Premier seeks to drive performance improvement by helping its members improve care quality while safely reducing associated costs and by collecting and analyzing clinical, supply chain, analytical, financial and operational data.
Challenge
Early in its 40-year history, Premier—and the healthcare industry, in general—viewed healthcare improvement largely in terms of cost-cutting. Over decades, however, Premier has shifted its focus to serving its members from a clinical perspective as well, supporting improved patient outcomes even as it removes cost from the system.
Optimizing its members’ healthcare quality, safety, and operational and financial success is challenging. It requires Premier to analyze business performance and the performance of specific medical procedures based on the resource, tool and technology costs allocated to achieving a desirable outcome. This analysis requires enterprisewide access to actionable clinical data and putting information in the hands of people who need it, when they need it.
However, hospital data has traditionally been kept in silos. Standardizing previously segregated data and providing alliancewide access to it while ensuring data security is a significant process management and IT challenge, but a critical one for Premier as the organization seeks to analyze, compare and improve performance across its network of member hospitals.
Solution
With IBM as its technology and service provider—along with IBM Partner Perficient, Inc.—Premier is building an integrated infrastructure that allows its membership to access and apply industry best practices, actionable information and workflow-related business rules, both on the business and clinical sides of its operations.
Premier is using IBM WebSphere® ILOG® and IBM WebSphere Lombardi Edition software as the foundation of its centralized, interactive information distribution platform, which eliminates data silos, thereby making information actionable and operational. The organization now collects real-time analytics and produces comparative reports, providing individual hospitals with insights they now use to evaluate their performance and drive improvement in areas ranging from patient care to resource allocation and financials.
Benefits
• Reduces healthcare-related costs by virtue of systemic process improvements and evidence-based care
• Drives continuous improvement in patient care through greater data access, standardization and analytics
• Increases the predictive value of data, enabling greater agility in a changing healthcare environment
For more information
To learn more about IBM WebSphere software, please contact your IBM representative or IBM Business Partner, or visit:
ibm.com/websphere
Products and services used
IBM products and services that were used in this case study.
Legal Information
© Copyright IBM Corporation 2012 IBM Corporation Software Group Route 100Somers, NY 10589 U.S.A. Produced in the United States of America January 2012 All Rights Reserved IBM, the IBM logo, ibm.com, ILOG and WebSphere are trademarks of International Business Machines Corp., registered in many jurisdictions worldwide. Other product and service names might be trademarks of IBM or other companies. A current list of IBM trademarks is available on the Web at “Copyright and trademark information” at ibm.com/legal/copytrade.shtml Other company, product, or service names may be trademarks or service marks of others. The information contained in this documentation is provided for informational purposes only. While efforts were made to verify the completeness and accuracy of the information contained in this documentation, it is provided “as is” without warranty of any kind, express or implied. In addition, this information is based on IBM’s current product plans and strategy, which are subject to change by IBM without notice. IBM shall not be responsible for any damages arising out of the use of, or otherwise related to, this documentation or any other documentation. Nothing contained in this documentation is intended to, nor shall have the effect of, creating any warranties or representations from IBM (or its suppliers or licensors), or altering the terms and conditions of the applicable license agreement governing the use of IBM software. References in this publication to IBM products or services do not imply that IBM intends to make them available in all countries in which IBM operates. All customer examples described are presented as illustrations of how those customers have used IBM products and the results they may have achieved. Actual environmental costs and performance characteristics may vary by customer. Please Recycle