CHARLOTTE, N.C.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Premier Inc. (NASDAQ: PINC) today announced a new, two-year, $8 million national partnership with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office of Women’s Health to leverage Premier’s data and proven performance improvement methodology to scale advancements in care for mothers and infants across the nation.

Maternal health is a national priority. While rates of maternal mortality and morbidity have increased in the U.S. in recent years, evidence shows that the majority of pregnancy-related deaths and harm are preventable with standardized, highly reliable care.

Over the course of the partnership, Premier and the HHS Office of Women’s Health will leverage Premier’s data, which represents 45 percent of U.S. hospital discharges, to analyze the risk factors affecting maternal morbidity and mortality – such as rising maternal age, racial and ethnic disparities, socioeconomic factors and comorbidities. In addition, HHS and Premier will unite a cohort of at least 200 hospitals to join Premier’s data-driven Perinatal Collaborative. Premier will implement standardized, evidence-based practices and care bundles with collaborative members, measuring outcomes to identify and scale the most effective practices.

“Premier has long been a passionate advocate of putting mothers and babies at the center of care,” said Susan DeVore, CEO of Premier. “We are honored to partner with HHS, which selected Premier for our gold-standard healthcare data, unmatched measurement and analytics capabilities, and proven track record of quality improvement. We look forward to working alongside HHS to make America the safest place in the world to give birth.”

The nation’s current maternal health surveillance system relies on voluntary, self-reported data from states, resulting in inconsistent and delayed reporting of outcomes and health trends. In addition, the U.S. process does not routinely track data that connects outcomes to known causes of maternal harm and death. Premier’s data is timely, standardized, accurate and comprehensive, and drills into hundreds of maternal and infant health outcome measures at the time of delivery, allowing for precise analysis of clinical and demographic influences. Using Premier’s extensive database and Perinatal Quality Dashboard, Premier members can correlate health factors with mortality and morbidity, enabling actionable intelligence that has proven to improve quality and safety.

With one of the longest histories of running collaboratives with proven results, Premier currently organizes more than 1,500 hospitals in data-driven collaboratives that outperform the nation in quality and safety improvement, cost reduction and risk sharing. Premier collaborative members have saved nearly $18 billion and 200,000 lives; managed ACOs that reduce Medicare spending by more than $839 million; performed 29 percent better in earning value-based purchasing payments; and achieved a 10 percent lower mortality rate than national averages.

Reducing health disparities is an important element of the Premier and HHS partnership. Via a data-driven collaborative of more than 200 hospitals, Premier will utilize HHS-defined criteria to engage a nationally representative sample of U.S. birthing hospitals – including those that serve geographic locations with high mortality rates and that represent racially and ethnically diverse patient populations, such as Pennsylvania-based Universal Health Services and Maryland-based LifeBridge Health. The initiative will also include collaboration with the MoMMA’s Voices Coalition to ensure patient perspectives from all social and racial populations are captured.

“LifeBridge Health has worked with Premier for years on data-driven performance improvement initiatives, and we are eager to see how this effort can help America achieve the best outcome for every mother and baby,” said Neil Meltzer, President and CEO, LifeBridge Health. “As an organization focused on community health and wellness, we look forward to learning from this work and seeing how it can help people in our communities, both locally and across the nation.”

The initiative with HHS will provide research on the correlation between a mother’s health risks and the ensuing effect on her baby – building on Premier’s decades of experience working with providers to reduce mortality, morbidity, harm and costs. Hospitals that have joined Premier’s previous perinatal efforts have decreased maternal deaths, harm and birth trauma by more than 20 percent; improved early elective deliveries by 67 percent; and decreased medical malpractice claims by 39 percent.

“As a provider of hospital and healthcare services, we are focused on high-quality care for all patients, and we are excited by this initiative,” said Rachel Sheehan, Director of Women’s Services, Acute Care Division, Universal Health Services. “Universal Health Services has worked with Premier for years on data-driven initiatives to drive quality improvement. We look forward to seeing how this work supports evidence-based practices that will help achieve the best outcome for every mother and baby.”