Marquette General Health System joins Premier healthcare alliance

Marquette General Health System of Marquette, Mich., has joined the Premier healthcare alliance, consisting of more than 2,500 hospitals and 76,000 other healthcare sites, to improve care delivery.

“We believe this new partnership will help improve the value of the health services Marquette provides to our community and look forward to furthering our work with Premier.”

As a Premier owner, Marquette leverages a national purchasing network delivering industry-leading contract pricing. The not-for-profit health system formerly utilized MedAssets as its national purchasing organization.

Marquette also collaborates and compares performance with other members of the alliance to improve care efficiency while safely reducing waste and costs using the nation's largest clinical, financial and operational database.

"Premier's business model is unique in that it is completely owned by its members and thus accountable to and fully aligned with their goals," said Gary Muller, president & CEO at Marquette. "We believe this new partnership will help improve the value of the health services Marquette provides to our community and look forward to furthering our work with Premier."

The health system participates in two Premier collaboratives for additional performance improvement opportunities.

As a new member of Premier's ASCEND^® (Accelerated Supply Chain Endeavor) program, Marquette aggregates, monitors and analyzes supply chain data to identify improvement opportunities. This includes simplified and consistent purchasing processes, appropriate clinical utilization and specially negotiated contracts. Members of ASCEND have saved $56 million over two years, without sacrificing the quality of care.

To support its purchasing decisions, the health system uses Premier supply chain tools like SpendAdvisor^® MySpend™, to easily examine spend data.

Marquette is also a member of Premier's PACT™ (Partnership for Care Transformation) collaborative, which unites 90 health systems representing approximately 450 hospitals, 20,000 physicians, and millions of covered lives to share best practices for coordinated care development. Data from Premier's QualityAdvisor™ supports the system with collaborative efforts. The tool helps providers reduce readmissions, hospital-acquired conditions and value-based purchasing penalties while addressing professional practice evaluation.

The combination of Premier data, such as QualityAdvisor and MySpend, has helped hospitals save millions of dollars over the past year.

"We exist to help alliance members drive savings and value while improving care quality," said Premier Chief Operating Officer Mike Alkire. "This can be achieved through clinically-proven enhancements to resource utilization, standardization and aggregation strategies that change practice and purchasing patterns for better outcomes at the lowest possible costs."

Susan DeVore, president and CEO of Premier said, "Our new partnership with Marquette is already helping member hospitals nationwide identify opportunities to enhance care, safety and outcomes. We're honored to have them as part of the alliance."