Baystate Health Selects Premier Inc. to Support Innovation Center

SPRINGFIELD — Baystate Health has selected Premier Inc.’s data-warehouse and business-intelligence platform, PremierConnect Enterprise, to support the development of innovative solutions within its new Health Informatics & Technology Innovation Center.

Home to the largest health-insurance company in Western Mass. and a flagship academic medical center, Baystate Health received a $5.5 million grant from the state last year to build the Baystate Health Innovation Center. The Innovation Center, which will officially launch this fall, is designed to connect healthcare information technology (HIT) vendors with physicians and other providers of care at Baystate Health to co-develop innovative solutions to the rapidly changing healthcare environment.

Baystate Health has been a member of Premier and its predecessor companies for 30 years, leveraging both its performance and supply-chain services. Last fall, the health system deployed PremierConnect Enterprise to quickly and more efficiently access, integrate, and interpret its clinical, financial, and operational data. Seeing the positive results, the Innovation Center signed a separate, multi-year agreement to use PremierConnect Enterprise to integrate payer, provider, and other healthcare data from participating innovators within a structured collaborative environment. By leveraging PremierConnect Enterprise’s platform and unique healthcare-data model, innovators will easily access and manipulate data for testing and scaling new HIT solutions.

“Our goal is to grow innovative solutions for the very real challenges of healthcare today in collaboration with innovators from around the globe,” said Joel Vengco, vice president and chief information officer at Baystate Health. “This long-term partnership with Premier provides us with the infrastructure and capabilities necessary to liberate healthcare data within an open workspace that a broad group of researchers, innovators, and providers can access. The platform and data combined will allow us to accelerate new HIT solutions that improve the quality and efficiency of patient care.”

The Innovation Center resources will be available for select innovators working on solutions that support new healthcare models, beyond the use of electronic health records, to better manage population health, value-based care, and the revenue cycle. PremierConnect Enterprise is a cloud-based service managed by Premier. It will support this work through its multifaceted platform that combines data warehousing with the ability to acquire, standardize, transform, and integrate big data; produce actionable analytics; and garner predictive insights.

“Baystate Health is a model health system with a strong footprint in leading research across the critical areas of healthcare quality and outcomes,” said Michael Alkire, Premier’s chief operating officer. “Premier is proud to be a part of the next-generation work of the Innovation Center and its innovators at such a crucial time, as we chisel away the silos in healthcare.”

Keith Figlioli, Premier’s senior vice president of healthcare informatics and a member of the Office of the National Coordinator’s Health IT Standards Committee, noted that “this collaboration is vital to the creation of flexible HIT resources and infrastructures that bring the best ideas from the brightest minds to reality more quickly, and spread them across our industry.”

PremierConnect Enterprise includes expert advisory services and membership in the Data Alliance Collaborative, a group of the nation’s leading health systems, including Baystate Health, that share knowledge and assets to accelerate the development of the analytics and business intelligence needed to improve population health and operational performance. The Innovation Center provides a new way for collaborative participants to work with innovators to test potential solutions that advance value-based care. These solutions are expected to have a direct path toward the possible adoption of HIT best practices across Premier’s alliance of 3,000 hospitals and 110,000 other providers.

Premier expects its expanded relationship with the Baystate Health Innovation Center to contribute to fiscal 2015 revenue and earnings. With the addition of the Innovation Center, Premier now has nine healthcare organizations leveraging its PremierConnect Enterprise services.