Premier Inc. launches campaign to advance maternal and infant healthcare

Premier Inc., in a news release, says it has partnered with industry, health systems and individual clinicians to create a new Bundle of Joy campaign that aims to improve the current quality, safety and cost of care for mothers and babies. The company said the project will entail developing brand-new care delivery models -- and the timing couldn’t be better as more women in the U.S. are dying from childbirth complications than ever before, especially minority women, and the majority of those deaths are preventable.

“Our goal for the Bundle of Joy campaign is to ensure mothers and babies are always at the center of care and supported by the latest evidence, the best doctors and the most successful practices,” said Susan DeVore, President and CEO of Premier.

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The company says The Bundle of Joy campaign is a multi-year effort to collaboratively assess, build, implement and broadly share the tools and best practices that are needed to ensure every birth is a safe, healthy and joyful journey for mothers and their babies. Premier says it is in the process of developing a strategic advisory committee for the campaign and invites industry organizations to inquire about participation. The Bundle of Joy campaign goals include:

·  Evaluating the current state and pinpointing specific improvement opportunities using Premier’s robust database, which houses information on more than 45 percent of all U.S. hospital discharges, 100 billion data points and 1.2 million annual births.

· Connecting providers through data-driven, collaborative, performance improvement work that aligns frontline clinicians to best practices and evidence-based reliability guidelines.

· Engaging brilliant industry minds to find the solutions that work and scale them across Premier’s national alliance of more than 4,000 hospitals and health systems.

·  Researching specific therapeutic interventions and tools and assessing their clinical efficacy over time.

·  Linking clinical quality and performance from primary care to hospital to post-acute care.

·  Designing and implementing a 12-month optimal care model that includes pregnancy, labor and delivery, and post-partum care.

·  Transparently sharing the progress being made across the nation and the best practices achieving those results.

· Collaborating with employers and insurers to contract with high-performing providers and improve the overall care provided to employees and their children.

The Premier Perinatal Safety Initiative was an earlier program that piloted new care processes in 14 hospitals in the form of three clinical bundles. From that effort, Premier says participating hospitals reduced total adverse events impacting mothers and neonates by more than 14 percent, reduced birth trauma incidents by more than 15 percent, maternal and neonatal deaths by 20 percent, and maternal harm by 20 percent.

“Because of our longstanding collaboration with healthcare providers, Premier is uniquely positioned to collectively improve performance in the most efficient way – from the inside,” DeVore said. “Only healthcare providers can truly innovate the care delivery process. This effort is bringing scale to innovation and moving the outcomes for our nation forward in a more meaningful way.”