Banner Health to use Premier's Web-based labor benchmarking solution

Banner Health is expanding its relationship with the Premier healthcare alliance to include Premier’s OperationsAdvisor^® (OA) Web-based labor benchmarking solution. All 22 hospitals in the Phoenix-based healthcare system will utilize OA, part of Premier’s LaborConnect™ program, to better manage labor costs while improving quality and safety.

“To achieve operational success, organizations need to strategically identify key areas of performance improvement, prioritize resulting projects, create effective standards and validate budget decisions. Benchmarking data is key as it allows hospitals to create effective labor standards, validate budget decisions and prioritize process improvement projects.”

Banner has benefited from using the OA SupplyFocus^® module over the last six years and has made the decision to add the labor benchmarking component to their performance improvement road map.

“We were looking for a solution to help us better manage our hospital labor performance as well as our corporate overhead areas,” said Dennis Dahlen, Banner Health’s chief financial officer. “Premier’s OperationsAdvisor, used in concert with their other tools to monitor infection control and quality, provides us the ability to compare against our peers and national benchmarks to ensure that we’re targeting best practices in terms of both efficiency and quality.”

Continued Dahlen, “Premier also convinced us that their peer group provides a rich database for benchmarking the growing list of centralized ‘overhead’ functions such as IT, revenue cycle, human resources, etc. We know Premier well from our decade of ownership and are confident that this solution will help us reduce our labor costs while allowing our clinical staff to more effectively serve our patients.”

The not-for-profit healthcare system has been an owner of the Premier Purchasing Partners group purchasing network since 2000 and recently confirmed ownership in Premier. Banner Health also uses Premier performance and cost improvement solutions such as SafetySurveillor^® to help prevent healthcare-associated infections, QualityManager™ to enhance efficiency and quality care measures, and SupplyFocus to benchmark supply costs. The healthcare system serves Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Nebraska, Nevada and Wyoming.

Said Premier Senior Vice President of Healthcare Informatics Keith J. Figlioli, “To achieve operational success, organizations need to strategically identify key areas of performance improvement, prioritize resulting projects, create effective standards and validate budget decisions. Benchmarking data is key as it allows hospitals to create effective labor standards, validate budget decisions and prioritize process improvement projects.”

With more than 500 subscribing facilities using OA, hospitals compare performance to benchmarks and peer facility performance, as well as understand and adopt best practices used by peer hospital organizations.

Banner Health hospitals have access to the Premier Performance Improvement Portal™, a library of industry best practices, as well as a networking community for knowledge sharing and interaction with industry specialists, hospital and health system peers and Premier's knowledge experts.

Premier's LaborConnect program is a comprehensive, integrated product and service offering that combines productivity, benchmarking, management engineering and executive consulting. The program is aimed at addressing the pressing labor challenges facing hospitals and healthcare organizations today.