Lessons premier hospitals learned about implementing electronic health records.

Implementing health information technology (IT) is a major strategic objective for providers. To pinpoint considerations that tie to success, the Premier health care alliance surveyed hospitals to develop an electronic health record best-practices library. Compiled from diverse health care organizations, the library outlines considerations to support "meaningful use" in the areas of computerized physician order entry, medication management, clinical documentation, reporting of measures, privacy, information exchange, management of populations' health, and personal health records. Best practices also uncovered strategies for securing executive leadership, culture change, communication, and support for clinicians. This paper summarizes lessons from the library, providing recommendations to speed up health IT implementation.

Results from the first 4 years of pay for performance.

Some of the lessons hospitals that have participated in the Hospital Quality Incentive Demonstration project have learned include: the need to tie in quality-of-care initiatives to the organization's strategic plan and to incentive plans for all employees, from executives on down; the value in allowing hospital physicians to "own" quality improvement initiatives; the importance of making results of the initiative available to all staff; the benefit of creating best-practice teams to address improvements in specific clinical areas.

The value of value-based purchasing.

In the first four years of the Hospital Quality Incentive Demonstration (HQID) project operated by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Improvement (CMS) and Premier, Inc., HQID hospitals improved their composite quality scores by 17.2 percent across five clinical areas. If every hospital were able to replicate this level of performance, an estimated $4.5 billion and 70,000 lives would be saved each year, according to CMS and Premier.