Premier Inc. Launches Nationwide Bundle of Joy Campaign to Scale Advancements in Maternal Healthcare Throughout the U.S.

CHARLOTTE, North Carolina, April 2 -- Premier, a healthcare improvement company, issued the following news release:

Premier Inc. (NASDAQ: PINC), a leading healthcare improvement company, has launched the Bundle of Joy(TM) campaign to raise the bar on the quality, safety and cost of care for mothers and babies across the U.S. Premier aims to build and deploy new care delivery models using evidence-based guidelines and best practices from around the nation, ultimately scaling proven advancements across the industry.

"Every new mother and child deserves the best beginning possible, at the most affordable price point," said Susan DeVore, President and CEO of Premier. "Our goal for the Bundle of Joy campaign is to ensure mothers and babies are always at the center of care and supported by the latest evidence, the best doctors and the most successful practices. We're building on our years of work as well as our expertise in syndicating innovative ideas and data from our powerful footprint of health system, industry and clinician partners to measure, monitor and scale industry advancements."

Maternal health is a national priority. Mothers are at higher risk of dying during childbirth in the U.S. than in any other industrialized nation. America is also the only developed nation with an increasing maternal mortality rate. However, more than 60 percent of pregnancy-related deaths in the U.S. are preventable. The Bundle of Joy campaign is a multi-year effort to collaboratively assess, build, implement and broadly share the tools and best practices that are needed to ensure every birth is a safe, healthy and joyful journey for mothers and their babies.

The Bundle of Joy campaign ignites efforts to improve maternal and infant health by:

* Evaluating the current state and pinpointing specific improvement opportunities using Premier's robust database, which houses information on more than 45 percent of all U.S. hospital discharges, 100 billion data points and 1.2 million annual births.

* Connecting providers through data-driven, collaborative, performance improvement work that aligns frontline clinicians to best practices and evidence-based reliability guidelines.

* Engaging brilliant industry minds to find the solutions that work and scale them across Premier's national alliance of more than 4,000 hospitals and health systems.

* Researching specific therapeutic interventions and tools and assessing their clinical efficacy over time.

* Linking clinical quality and performance from primary care to hospital to post-acute care.

* Designing and implementing a 12-month optimal care model that includes pregnancy, labor and delivery, and post-partum care.

* Transparently sharing the progress being made across the nation and the best practices achieving those results.

* Collaborating with employers and insurers to contract with high-performing providers and improve the overall care provided to employees and their children.

Premier has been working with health systems and industry associations to improve the quality and cost of maternal care for decades. The Premier Perinatal Safety Initiative, which ran from 2008-2013, tested new care processes in 14 hospitals to improve the quality and safety of perinatal care. Participants implemented and measured best practices in the form of three clinical bundles, leading to more reliable clinical quality and better patient outcomes in labor and delivery. These hospitals reduced total adverse events impacting mothers and neonates by 14.4 percent, outperforming a set of comparison hospitals. They also lowered birth trauma incidents by 15.7 percent, maternal and neonatal deaths by 20 percent, and maternal harm by 20 percent. The Bundle of Joy campaign will further expand this work and other Premier best practices.

"Because of our longstanding collaboration with healthcare providers, Premier is uniquely positioned to collectively improve performance in the most efficient way - from the inside," DeVore said. "Only healthcare providers can truly innovate the care delivery process. This effort is bringing scale to innovation and moving the outcomes for our nation forward in a more meaningful way."

Premier has the only analytics dashboard of its kind in the country that supports national efforts in harm reduction for perinatal and neonatal populations. The perinatal dashboard leverages clinical data from the PremierConnect(R) performance improvement database to target key metrics that support the identification of quality improvement efforts as well as reporting to federal and state agencies. It is population-specific with peer groups arranged by birth volume and includes Premier's proven risk-adjusted performance improvement methodologies.

Additionally, Premier will continue to work with dedicated leaders in maternal health, including the Council on Patient Safety in Women's Health Care, the Alliance for Innovation on Maternal Health, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and the Association of Women's Health, Obstetric and Neonatal Nurses.

Premier is currently building a Bundle of Joy Strategic Advisory Committee and welcomes industry organizations to inquire about participation on the committee or as part of the campaign. For more information visit www.premierinc.com/bundleofjoy.

About Premier, Inc.

Premier Inc. (NASDAQ: PINC) is a leading healthcare improvement company, uniting an alliance of more than 4,000 U.S. hospitals and health systems and approximately 165,000 other providers and organizations to transform healthcare. With integrated data and analytics, collaboratives, supply chain solutions, and consulting and other services, Premier enables better care and outcomes at a lower cost. Premier plays a critical role in the rapidly evolving healthcare industry, collaborating with members to co-develop long-term innovations that reinvent and improve the way care is delivered to patients nationwide. Headquartered in Charlotte, N.C., Premier is passionate about transforming American healthcare. Please visit Premier's news and investor sites on www.premierinc.com; as well as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram and Premier's blog for more information about the company.