Breaking Through to the New Healthcare

Richard Bankowitz, M.D., enterprise-wide chief medical officer, Premier Inc., Charlotte, N.C.: It’s actually been great sitting here and learning about what’s been going on in these hospitals. And it all fits in very well with the themes of our Breakthroughs Conference. The first learning is that the transformation has to be provider-led. We believe that providers have to lead the way in lowering costs and improving quality. And you didn’t hear anyone here say they’re waiting for D.C. to tell us what to do. The second theme has been the theme of innovation; we’ve been highlighting a lot of our supplier partners; we’ve been highlighting a lot of the QUEST innovators in our QUEST meeting; we’ve been sharing a lot of ideas. And the last theme has been the power of the alliance. And one of the things we’ve done is to launch an alliance called PremierConnect. Premier has just leveraged its considerable IT resources to help our member organizations connect data, knowledge, and people. So we’re putting all our database applications on this one platform. Premier is trying to help facilitate and accelerate change.

Richard Bankowitz, M.D.

Any last thoughts?

Dr. Benjamin: This is a real time of change in healthcare; we’re going through a lot of transitions. We’re trying to change cultures, trying to move towards team-based care; move towards chronic-based management; move towards bundled payments. And all the population-level care management—this is all really new. So we’ll be on this journey for a long time.