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Premier: P4P could save 70,000 lives per year

Quality Improvement Monitor, February 1, 2008

If all U.S. hospitals were to achieve the three-year cost and mortality improvements found among the CMS/Premier pay-for-performance project participants for pneumonia, heart bypass, heart failure, acute myocardial infarction, and hip and knee replacement patient populations, they could save an estimated 70,000 lives per year and reduce hospital costs by more than $4.5 billion annually.

"Our work with hundreds of hospitals across the nation provides evidence of how the U.S. healthcare system is showing improvements and patients are getting higher quality healthcare," Richard Norling, Premier president and CEO said in a press release issued yesterday. "The findings from this analysis clearly suggest that, through the reliable delivery of basic care processes, improving clinical quality and safely reducing costs is attainable for all hospitals across the country."

The Premier analysis of 1.1 million patient records from participating hospitals encompasses 8.5% of all patients nationally. On average, the median hospital cost per patient for participants in the CMS/Premier pilot declined by more than $1,000 across the first three years of the project, whereas the median mortality rate decreased by 1.87%.

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