Henry Ford Innovations, Premier Inc. Partner to Incubate Innovation and Advance Clinical Research

DETROIT (April 26, 2022) - Henry Ford Innovations (HFI), one of the nation’s leading healthcare innovation programs, has partnered with Premier, Inc.’s PINC AI Applied Sciences (PAS) to accelerate the research, testing and development of new products, services, interventions and other novel healthcare initiatives.

HFI and PAS will partner in three distinct areas:

· To jointly leverage data, clinical input and other research to evaluate novel, new therapies and interventions for commercial development.

· To conduct prospective research on specific care pathways and other interventions using real-world data and evidence (RWD/RWE).

· To improve the quality and speed of clinical trials using artificial intelligence (AI) to identify the best possible patient candidates more rapidly.

“The mission of Henry Ford Innovations is to foster discoveries and advancements that improve people’s lives. Our relationship with PINC AI and their industry partners adds ‘rocket fuel’ to our existing data-focused work, from clinical research to quality, value and operational efficiency. The resulting projects and commercial development will improve healthcare for all of us,” said Lisa Prasad, Vice President and Chief Innovation Officer of Henry Ford Health.

Denise Juliano, Life Sciences Group Vice President, PAS, said partnering blends the innovation mindsets of both organizations and brings down barriers that can slow the time that meaningful, innovative ideas take to get to market - and benefit people who need it most.

“This partnership brings two research and innovation powerhouses together to quickly test methodologies and interventions, deploy solutions and scale interventions in a standardized way,” Juliano said. “Together, Henry Ford Innovations and PAS are building the necessary data, research-ready trial sites and representative populations that can be rapidly activated to study innovation, thus peeling away unnecessary layers of bureaucracy to bring novel therapies to market faster. We believe our work together will generate better answers to key questions with greater transparency, equity, operational efficiency and savings.”

Specifically, Henry Ford Innovations and PAS plan to focus on a variety of clinical areas including value-based projects related to equity and disparities, quality and value improvement in primary and specialty care, and research around chronic disease.

“When you have done one clinical trial, you have done one clinical trial, and it’s over,” said Dr. Scott Dulchavsky, Chairman of Surgery and Surgeon in Chief at Henry Ford Health, and CEO of the Innovation Institute. “With this partnership, we enable the infrastructure of a well-oiled engine primed for research, clinical hypothesis testing and enabling real world evidence to drive our clinical and operational decision-making.”

In addition to these innovation projects, HFI will also leverage new technology solutions from PAS that combine natural language processing with machine learning to glean insights from unstructured, clinical notes in the electronic medical record to identify the best patients for research or trials more rapidly.

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NEWS MEDIA ONLY may contact: Kim North Shine / 313-549-4995 / kshine2@hfhs.org

Forward-Looking Statements
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About Henry Ford Innovations
Henry Ford Innovations (HFI) is one of the nation’s leading healthcare innovation programs. HFI uses the full spectrum of Henry Ford Health’s technology, data and knowhow to translate leading edge discoveries for clinical use, manage best-of-class corporate partnership programs, and spur economic growth by driving the local life sciences ecosystem. It is the partner of choice for domestic and international corporations and early stage companies that desire to further research and innovation and bring to practice high value medical devices, technologies and therapies.

About PINC AI™ Applied Sciences
PAS is a trusted leader in accelerating healthcare improvement through services, data, and scalable solutions, spanning the continuum of care and enabling sustainable innovation and rigorous research. These services and real-world data are valuable resources for the pharmaceutical, device and diagnostic industries, academia, federal and national healthcare agencies, as well as hospitals and health systems. Since 2000, PAS researchers have produced more than 775 publications which appear in 264 scholarly, peer-reviewed journals, covering a wide variety of topics, and conduct population-based analyses of drugs, devices, treatments, disease states, epidemiology, resource utilization, healthcare economics and clinical outcomes.

About PINC AI
PINC AI™ is the technology and services platform of Premier, Inc. (NASDAQ: PINC). Made up of 20 years’ worth of cost, quality and operational data gleaned from 45 percent of U.S. hospital discharges, as well as 812 million hospital outpatient and clinic encounters and 131 million physician office visits, PINC AI provides actionable intelligence that improves outcomes, supports improved financial performance and enables success in new, alternative payment models. PINC AI offerings rely on advanced analytics to identify improvement opportunities, consulting services for clinical and operational design, and workflow solutions to hardwire sustainable change. With a leading network of provider organizations, PINC AI accelerates ingenuity and serves as a large-scale innovation catalyst in healthcare.