Premier Healthcare Alliance, Activate Networks Partner to Help Health Systems Assess and Predict Physician Behavior Across the Continuum

CHARLOTTE, N.C.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--A new partnership between the Premier healthcare alliance and Activate Networks Inc. will help health systems better align physicians and coordinate care.

“Premier alliance members will have access to the latest developments in network science, which have been shown to improve care coordination and reduce costs in recent research at Harvard and Johns Hopkins. This approach is a ‘win-win’ for health systems, their providers, and their patients.”

NetworkAdvisor™, powered by Activate Networks, enhances Premier’s clinical integration capabilities to identify specific physician referral pattern opportunities for care coordination, and points of influence in a physician network. The app integrates analytics from Activate Networks into Premier’s technology platform PremierConnect™ to improve population health and system design using network analysis. Both practicing physicians and physician leaders currently use PremierConnect to link outcomes with costs, analyze and compare data with peers, and support ongoing professional practice evaluation.

“We’re moving beyond measuring physician outcomes to assessing and predicting the behavior patterns of physicians across the continuum of care, which is of vital importance to health systems setting up high-value networks within an integrated care environment,” said Keith J. Figlioli, Premier senior vice president of healthcare informatics. “Our new partnership provides alliance members with richer, more valuable analytics driven with leading-edge social network research that enables them to excel in managing their populations, lowering costs and improving quality.”

With Activate Networks’ proprietary software platform, users can map the professional social networks of physicians to receive unique insights regarding network connections and alignment. The technology is based on the groundbreaking findings of Harvard researcher Nicholas Christakis, MD, PhD, MPH. Dr. Christakis and his colleagues have shown that many physician behaviors, such as the adoption of clinical best practices and therapeutic interventions, spread rapidly through their professional networks.

Based on administrative data, Activate Networks offers analytics that provide health systems:

An objective “bird’s eye” view of their network and existing practice and referral communities;
A total market-based view of loyalty, including both affiliated and out-of-network physicians;
Insight into the social influence of providers and identification of key physician influencers in the network;
A key foundation for implementing change programs within a physician/hospital delivery network; and
Better contextualization of referral insights through the cross-referencing of connectedness, efficiency, quality and other physician performance metrics.

“This partnership will enable many more health systems to develop high-value provider networks, a critical task as they prepare for care transformation over the next decade,” said Activate Networks CEO Larry Miller. “Premier alliance members will have access to the latest developments in network science, which have been shown to improve care coordination and reduce costs in recent research at Harvard and Johns Hopkins. This approach is a ‘win-win’ for health systems, their providers, and their patients.”

Activate Networks, the leading provider of network analytics for business, allows hospital systems to leverage the power of physician social networks to drive quality measures and improve care coordination.

Premier alliance member health systems, consisting of 400,000 physicians, use PremierConnect to benchmark patient-level quality and financial data with national standards and against one another to make high-quality, efficient care delivery decisions. The platform accesses the nation’s largest outcomes database with information on 1 in 4 U.S. hospital discharges, 2.5 million real-time clinical transactions daily and nearly $43 billion in annual purchasing data. PremierConnect also allows health systems to interact within the world’s largest social healthcare network to share learnings and accelerate the adoption of best practices that improve the health of communities.

PremierConnect recently received IBM’s 2012 Chief Technology Officer Innovation Award as a one-of-a-kind solution that extends the boundaries of current technology usage and provides a new vision that others may follow. Premier has placed among the nation’s 100 top technology innovators on the InformationWeek 500 list for the past three years, ranking 30^th overall and third in the healthcare industry in 2012.

About Activate Networks Inc.

Activate Networks Inc. is the leading provider of network analytics for businesses that identifies and provides insights about the key social connections that drive commercial, organizational and health results. Activate Networks' analytics platform and suite of applications enable organizations to unlock the commercial value of their customer, prospect and employee real-world social networks.

Activate Networks’ analytics platform is based on groundbreaking social-science research by the recognized leaders in network science, including Professor Nicholas Christakis, MD, PhD, MPH, of Harvard University; Professor James Fowler, PhD, of UC San Diego; and Professor Rob Cross, DBA, of the University of Virginia. The company combines its access to this intellectual property with recently available computing power. The result is vastly improved precision in mapping social connections, targeting key influencers, conducting campaigns and improving organizational effectiveness.

More information can be found at www.activatenetworks.net.

About the Premier healthcare alliance, Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award recipient

Premier is a performance improvement alliance of more than 2,700 U.S. hospitals and 90,000 other sites using the power of collaboration and technology to lead the transformation to coordinated, high-quality, cost-effective care. Owned by hospitals, health systems and other providers, Premier operates a leading healthcare purchasing network with more than $4 billion in annual savings. Premier also maintains the nation's largest clinical, financial and outcomes database with information on 1 in 4 patient discharges. A world leader in delivering measurable improvements in care, Premier works with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. Headquartered in Charlotte, N.C., Premier also has an office in Washington. www.premierinc.com. Stay connected with Premier on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.