Premier, Inc. is an alliance of approximately 3,400 U.S. hospitals and 110,000 other providers whose goal is to improve the performance of healthcare. As an industry leader, the Premier alliance believes that it has created one of the most comprehensive databases of actionable data, best practices and cost reduction strategies.
It seems that the company’s confidence in its cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution is well placed. According to research firm KLAS it has received the highest scores in healthcare for adaptability, functionality and supply chain, as well as for financial management.
KLAS is a company that conducts over 1,900 healthcare provider interviews per month. The name is an acronym using a letter from each of the founders’ names. It works with more than 4,500 hospitals and over 3,000 doctor’s offices and clinics. KLAS publishes approximately 40 performance and perception reports per year.
Earlier this year, in March, Premier introduced an end-to-end cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution designed to help health systems manage their entire procurement process across the field of healthcare. It allows users to easily measure supply chain and operational performance, as well as identify inefficiencies giving users the ability to take action to quickly resolve any issues.
The cloud-based SaaS solution is powered by PremierConnect Supply Chain which incorporates capabilities from Aperek, a company that was acquired by Premier in August 2014. PremierConnect Supply Chain is a comprehensive, cloud-based procure-to-pay and supply chain analytics suite. It allows users to not only integrate, but also monitor and manage supply chain and financial work streams. This can be accomplished across a broad network of care facilities making it easy to synchronize and standardize the procurement process.
According to KLAS’ report, “Premier leads the pack in providing mature and intuitive analytics and reporting capabilities in its report. Premier delivers an extremely user-friendly system with robust functionality and healthcare-specific capabilities to drive costs down.”
Chief operating officer at Premier, Michael J. Alkire, said, “Providers are finding that they need real-time, comprehensive supply chain data to drive quick, holistic decisions. Health systems across the country are using PremierConnect Supply Chain to integrate daily work streams, improve outcomes and reduce costs across all sites of care.”
This can be seen in the fact that since the solution was launched in March, close to 20 health systems have adopted at least one if not more of its capabilities. Included in this list is Baystate Health of Springfield, Massachusetts, which has a total of 1,002 beds across five facilities.
Edited by
Dominick Sorrentino
