Enabling high-quality healthcare and outcomes with better analytics
- 200K Lives saved using insights
- 4,350+ Allied U.S. hospitals and health systems
- ≈ 300K Other providers
Improving the way healthcare is delivered to patients nationwide
“Hospitals are data rich but information poor,” says Premier, Inc.’s vice president and chief technology officer, Todd Wilkes.
Every healthcare provider and health system’s desired outcome is to deliver exceptional patient care. Healthcare improvement company Premier, Inc. supports U.S. hospitals, health systems, and other providers in safely delivering positive patient outcomes through integrated data and analytics, collaboratives, supply chain solutions, consulting, and other services. By uniting an alliance of healthcare providers, Premier has created one of the most comprehensive databases of actionable data, clinical best practices, and efficiency improvement strategies.
“Premier really helps our hospitals and health systems by getting better with their analytics and supporting their decision-making processes, whether with supply chain or in the clinical space of how they treat patients and the ability to do that in a safe manner,” continues Wilkes.
Integrating and harmonizing healthcare data
The U.S. produces over 1.2 billion clinical documents each year, with that number expected to grow by 48% annually, according to a Stanford Medicine health trends report. As a result, many healthcare organizations face challenges in accessing, extracting, and preparing data for actionable and trusted information.
“There are silos of data across the different parts of the health system, whether it’s their enterprise resource planning (ERP), how they manage human resources (HR), payroll, the clinician systems, the lab systems, the operating room (OR) systems, and the billing systems. There’s a lot of data, but the data points don’t talk to each other,” explains Wilkes.
Health systems need the capability to transform all their data into actionable, meaningful information that identifies opportunities and creates roadmaps to improvement. And that’s where Premier, Inc. comes in.
By integrating and harmonizing data from its alliance of hospitals, health systems, and providers in VantageCloud on Azure, Premier, Inc. optimizes supply chain operations. Integrating medical supply purchasing levels with clinical data across multiple hospitals and providers, Premier, Inc. identifies potential spikes in inventory demand, such as regional or geographical outbreaks that warrant further supplies. This leads to predicting supply and inventory demand to prevent out-of-stocks. Insights are gained by harmonizing data across the broader healthcare landscape and don’t rely solely on a single hospital or provider to assess demand levels of medical supplies.
“Our mission is to improve the health of our communities. By working with our member hospitals within supply chains, we’re able to provide greater transparency and predict product shortages,” continues Wilkes.
Better clinical outcomes using Teradata ClearScape Analytics™
Premier, Inc. empowers its alliance with leading artificial intelligence (AI) driven healthcare analytics to improve quality of care and health outcomes. Premier Inc.’s PINC AI™ technology platform gives users the ability to access mission-critical clinical, financial, and operational data. With an open and connected platform for AI, Premier, Inc. members can further integrate supplemental data and bring their own analytical tools of choice as part of ClearScape Analytics.
“The fact that VantageCloud is an open and connected ecosystem is critically important to us. By not only leveraging the data that we have already integrated and harmonized on their behalf in VantageCloud, hospitals can also bring in and integrate supplemented data to then use their own business intelligence (BI) and AI tools,” explains Wilkes.
Teradata’s freedom of choice for analytics allows users to use the tools and languages with which they are most familiar, such as structured query language (SQL), Python, R, or others. This flexibility eliminates the need to learn proprietary tools or query languages with the use of industry-standard tools. Additionally, ClearScape Analytics and VantageCloud provide Premier, Inc. members with access to a library of curated content from Premier, Inc. and other health systems to create customized queries that fit their organization’s unique needs without learning to code.
In addition, Premier Inc.’s PINC AI™ solutions leverage insights from AI models to help deliver quality care, achieve health equity, and improve patient safety.
“Our PINC AI™ Stanson clinical decision support (CDS) technology works with physicians in their workflow. So, while they have a patient at their bedside and they’re updating the electronic health record and talking with the patient, we’re running analytics in the background, leveraging the patient’s data and evidence-based research to present nudges back to the physician,” describes Wilkes.
“They’ll make the call whether they use them or not, but we’re giving them suggestions based on what we’re seeing in the data and with evidence-based research to allow them to make the best clinical decision possible.”
Moreover, the analytics and data support care improvement by allowing hospitals to understand how they compare to others within the Premier, Inc. alliance.
“With the data we have, analytics let them understand where they reside against benchmarks. Premier, Inc.’s PINC AI™ analytics allow for measuring best practices in full transparency so they can see where they reside relative to each other to understand what they’re doing to get better. It’s a way for us to partner around a common problem, learn what’s working, and put those insights into our products so our full customer base can take advantage,” says Wilkes.
Innovating faster, scaling smarter, and governing better with Teradata VantageCloud on Azure
“We have more than 1,500 hospitals participating in the analytics solutions and leveraging VantageCloud. We have a lot of concurrent users running their analytics, and we have not found another solution that can match Teradata’s workload management,” Wilkes explains.
Additionally, Teradata’s partnership with Microsoft is strategically important for Premier, Inc. and its alliance, given Microsoft’s presence in the healthcare space. According to Wilkes, “We’ve found many of our hospitals are already using Microsoft technologies and are familiar with Microsoft. They already understand the connection points to allow them to use their favorite Microsoft tools with VantageCloud. That’s been really important to us.”
Connecting data across cloud and on-premises environments to perform analytics differentiates Teradata for Premier, Inc. and its member health systems. Using Teradata QueryGrid to connect VantageCloud with object stores and data centers, Premier Inc. members access more data for deeper insights.
“We have some colder and older data in our co-located data centers. We’re able to use QueryGrid to pull that data as the customers need it, whether in a data store or object store, and then integrate the data to give them the full analytics they’re looking for,” describes Wilkes.
Teradata provides Premier with the price-to-performance ratio and governance needed to operate in a highly secure and regulated industry.
“We’ve looked at alternatives, and the price for performance with VantageCloud is very favorable. Beyond workload management and query performance, the simplicity in managing the platform and the analytics that we get are much further along than other competitors that we see,” says Wilkes.
Wilkes concludes that these innovations in AI, analytics, and data serve Premier Inc.’s mission of improving the health of communities. He says having data on more than 45% of U.S. hospital discharges powerfully informs care at the individual patient level.
“We’re all patients. Our families and friends are all patients. At the end of the day, we’re safely improving outcomes and overall efficiencies to make sure we’re doing the right thing for patients.”
Let’s connect
Find out how Teradata VantageCloud can help you to accelerate business outcomes and provide business agility you need.
Our sales representatives are here to help.