Premier Healthcare Alliance Video

Premier healthcare alliance and IBM are analyzing patient data from 2,500 hospitals and 73,000 clinics to determine the best treatments, reduce waste, and improve the overall health of the population.

Video Transcript

When you start thinking of all the various human handoffs that take place in the health care delivery process, it is complex.

You ultimately have to manage people. You also have to manage the knowledge or the communication within those people. And really, in this day and age, you are managing the underlying technology that helps you deal with all those issues…And that’s really what we are about – people, knowledge, and technology.

To address a lot of these challenges, one of the things that the Alliance has decided to do is put together…a project that we call Project Symphony.

Project Symphony in its most simple form is really having the ability to take information or data from any area of the health care system, aggregate it, benchmark it and actually impact performance in the health care system, and doing that in almost a near real time way…

You have an issue that the physician looks at you and says, “Listen, we really need to get you into the hospital…Rather than an automatic transition…a lot of times your typical physician’s grabbing your information and looking at all your data again…But who is taking a step back and saying what's really happening across that entire episode?

Somehow, someway we have got to automate those means so we focus on what matters, which is that clinician-to-patient exchange…

Project Symphony is an understanding of what's happening at a trend level across an episode back to that individual to say what's really happening and are we putting the right care plans or care protocols in place to ensure the best possible outcomes.

The nice thing about what we are doing with IBM is that we are truly partnered to deliver a full solution to the health care market…

…and we feel that that ability to be integrated from all the way to the database all the way up the entire stack of technology is a really important piece for us. The second piece is the flexibility and the modular nature of the overall system.

Premier and IBM are working together from a joint development agreement, that is very cognizant of the issues and the challenges…that our members are facing day to day in their operations.

When I think about my two children…I think about what's their life going to be like…and what it means for them to live in a society…that actually has figured this out, that has dealt with the complexities of the health care system and solved it.

And I think we all fundamentally believe that we want to transform it, and we want to make it better so every single patient gets the ideal care that they really deserve as an individual, as a human.