Aurora Health Care Top Performing Health System in National Quality Initiative

Second consecutive year that Aurora leads nation in quality

MILWAUKEE, Aug. 17 /PRNewswire/ -- Aurora Health Care is again the top
performing health system in the country in a national Centers for Medicare &
Medicaid Services (CMS), Premier healthcare alliance quality initiative. This
is the second consecutive year that Aurora has been the top performing health
system in the Hospital Quality Incentive Demonstration project that involves
250 hospitals from across the country.

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Two Aurora hospitals stand out as national leaders for individual performance
in the initiative. Aurora BayCare Medical Center in Green Bay was the top
performing hospital in the country. Aurora BayCare is the only hospital to
receive five Top Performer awards and one of four hospitals to receive the
maximum 10 awards. Aurora Sheboygan Memorial Medical Center is one of nine
hospitals to receive four Top Performer awards. The Sheboygan hospital also is
one of eight hospitals nationally to receive eight of a possible eight awards.

The quality initiative rewards hospitals for delivering higher quality care in
five major clinical areas by providing incentive payments for top performance.
The Hospital Quality Incentive Demonstration focuses on improving the quality
of patient care in congestive heart failure, heart attack, pneumonia, heart
bypass surgery, and hip and knee replacement.

In the Year 4 results that were just released, Aurora hospitals have excelled
in several of the quality areas.
-- Aurora's hospitals are top performers in 23 of the 47 quality areas
that are measured. This is the most of any system.
-- Aurora hospitals received 68 incentive payments, the most of any
system
in the country.

-- Aurora hospitals collectively achieved the incentive level for 100
percent of the 42 quality areas where they were potentially eligible
to
receive awards.

"Our commitment as a major health care provider in Wisconsin is to find ways
to provide care that lead to high quality, high-efficiency and low-costs.
These results demonstrate that our integrated model of care is fulfilling that
promise," said Nick Turkal, M.D., Aurora President and CEO. "We believe
strongly that our integrated health system is a better model for the patients
we serve. It enables us to provide care across all settings so patients have
easy access to the best care and service."

"When you look at reforming our health care system, the quality demonstration
model is a prime example of how we can improve access and care while
controlling costs," Turkal said.

Based on fourth-year results from the Hospital Quality Incentive
Demonstration, Aurora received a bonus payment of nearly $365,000 for the
health system's quality achievements. CMS awarded incentive payments of
approximately $12 million to 112 hospitals. Overall, 206 awards were given to
top-performing hospitals in the fourth year of the project.

The incentive payments to Aurora are utilized to further improve care and
provide data to physicians, nurses, pharmacists, and other caregivers.

"The successes of the hospitals - small and large, urban and rural, teaching
and non-teaching - in the Hospital Quality Incentive Demonstration project
have led to its consideration as the basis for key national health reforms,"
said Susan DeVore, Premier president and CEO. "As the proposal of a national
value-base purchasing program becomes a reality, hospitals participating in
the initiative will have six years experience with such a model."

The hospital quality results follow a recent study by Benefit Services Group
that concluded Aurora continues to be the most cost efficient hospital system
in southeastern Wisconsin.

About the Hospital Quality Incentive Demonstration project
The Hospital Quality Incentive Demonstration is the first national project of
its kind, designed to determine if economic incentives to hospitals are
effective at improving the quality of inpatient care. Through the project,
which has been extended by CMS for an additional three years, Premier collects
a set of more than 30 evidence-based clinical quality measures from almost 250
hospitals across the country. The quality measures were developed by
government and private organizations (for more information on the indicators,
visit: www.qualitydemo.com).

Hospital Quality Incentive Demonstration tracks process and outcome measures
in five clinical areas - acute myocardial infarction (AMI), heart failure,
coronary artery bypass graft (CABG), pneumonia, and hip and knee replacement.

Improvements in quality of care saved an estimated 4,700 acute myocardial
infarction (AMI/heart attack) patients across the first four years of the
project, according to an analysis of mortality rates at hospitals
participating in the project. In addition, patients received approximately
500,000 additional recommended evidence-based clinical quality measures, such
as smoking cessation, discharge instructions and pneumococcal vaccination,
during that same timeframe.

For hospitals participating in the HQID project, the average Composite Quality
Score (CQS), an aggregate of all quality measures within each clinical area,
improved by 2.2 percent between the project's third and fourth year for total
gains of 17.2 percent over the project's first four years.

Additional research by Premier using the Hospital Compare dataset showed that,
by March 2008, HQID participants scored on average 6.9 percentage points
higher (94.64 percent to 87.36 percent) than non-participants when evaluating
19 common Hospital Compare measures.

About Premier Inc., 2006 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award recipient The
Premier healthcare alliance is more than 2,200 U.S. hospitals and 58,000-plus
other healthcare sites working together to improve healthcare quality and
affordability. Premier maintains the nation's most comprehensive repository of
clinical, financial and outcomes information and operates a leading healthcare
purchasing network. A world leader in helping deliver measurable improvements
in care, Premier works with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and
the United Kingdom's National Health Service North West to improve hospital
performance. Premier has offices in San Diego, Charlotte, N.C., Philadelphia
and Washington.

About Aurora Health Care
Aurora Health Care is a not-for-profit Wisconsin health care provider and a
nationally recognized leader in efforts to improve the quality of health care.
Aurora offers services at sites in more than 90 communities throughout
eastern Wisconsin.

SOURCE Aurora Health Care

CONTACT: Ron Irwin of Aurora Health Care, +1-414-647-3405,
ron.irwin@aurora.org, Online newsroom, www.Aurora.org/Newsroom