Partnership for Patients Initiative to Improve Quality, Safety

April 18, 2012

TriHealth has advanced its mission to improve the quality, safety and affordability of healthcare for the patients it serves as a participant in the Partnership for Patients initiative.

Partnership for Patients, established by the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Innovation, offers support to physicians, nurses and other clinicians working in and out of hospitals. The goal is to keep patients from getting injured or sicker while in the hospital so they can heal without complications.

"Joining the Partnership for Patients initiative strengthens TriHealth's commitment to help you live better by sharing best practices for physicians, nurses, and staff and delivering the best and safest possible care for our patients," said Dr. Georges Feghali, Senior Vice President of Quality and Chief Medical Officer for TriHealth.

Specifically, participants focus on reducing preventable readmissions to hospitals by 20 percent and reducing preventable hospital-acquired conditions by 40 percent by the end of 2013. In doing so, CMS estimates that over the next three years the partnership has the potential to:

• Save 60,000 lives;
• Reduce millions of preventable injuries and complications in patient care; and
• Save as much as $35 billion, including up to $10 billion in savings to Medicare.

TriHealth has joined with the Premier healthcare alliance to participate in the initiative. Premier, a health system owned performance improvement alliance of hospitals and other healthcare organizations, is the second largest of 26 Hospital Engagement Networks (HEN) approved by CMS to participate in the initiative. As a HEN, Premier is helping identify the solutions already working to reduce healthcare-acquired conditions, and spread them to other hospitals and healthcare providers.

TriHealth joins more than 540 hospitals nationwide in Premier’s HEN and will benefit from Premier’s:

• Intensive training and education programs to make patient care safer.
• Technical assistance to achieve quality measurement goals.
• Online repository of safety literature and implementation strategies.
• National and regional best practice sharing forums.
• Data benchmarking and tracking to measures progress in meeting quality improvement goals.

In total, Partnership for Patients consists of more than 6,500 partners, including hospitals, physicians, nurses and patient advocates.