CHARLOTTE, NC -- The Premier healthcare alliance has honored three alliance members with its second annual Supply Chain Innovation Award for achieving successful innovations that have created new levels of performance and competitive advantage.

The awards were presented in ceremonies during Premier's annual Breakthroughs Conference and Exhibition, held June 10-13 in Nashville, Tenn. Winners as determined by a nine-member panel of external, internal and member judges are:

* Aurora Health Care of Milwaukee, which won two awards, the first for creating an asset investment recovery program that has a cradle-to-grave approach to maximize the remaining value of unused or underutilized medical equipment. The second award is for inclusion of a centralized clinical engineering service model in the capital supply chain, thereby creating a fully integrated, cradle-to-grave approach to all assets.
* Montefiore Medical Center of New York City, a Greater New York Hospital Association (GNYHA) member, for creating a materials par-stock process using predictive modeling and advanced technology known as materials replenishment processing. By development and utilization of a template to simplify the ordering process, a bill of material requires users to enter only the quantity required. Montefiore influenced Premier's decision to develop supply chain technology to manage total spend (national, regional and local contracts) -- not just proprietary national contracts -- more efficiently and effectively.

* Geisinger Health System of Danville, PA, for developing the use of the global location number (GLN) to structure membership within Premier. This innovative system assigns each healthcare location a unique 13-digit GLN. This registry keeps track of the name, address, class of trade, and organizational hierarchy information about each provider. Additionally, it maintains the same information about the healthcare manufacturers and distributors.

"These awards not only celebrate the successes of our top performers, but also encourage sharing of better practices and breakthrough ideas so we can all accelerate performance," Premier Purchasing Partners President Mike Alkire said. "The awards speak directly to several of the key roles of our Premier enterprise -- improve quality and reduce costs, improve financial health, and improve organizational health. The Supply Chain Innovation Award recognizes members that have worked with Premier to introduce the most innovative, high-impact supply chain improvement ideas to our membership. "These winning ideas are already in place and are even now creating value for members."

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