Program will enable the company to recognize top-performing hospitals and health systems nationally for quality, safety and service line excellence.
Purpose and methodology of the program tightly integrates with existing PINC AI^™ analytics, benchmarking and performance improvement collaborative measures.
Strong program brand and widespread participation will broaden PINC AI^™ reach to new customers, allowing the company to set industry standards for operational excellence, as well as consulting and technology tools that enable better community health outcomes.

Premier Inc. (NASDAQ:PINC) acquired the 100 Top Hospitals^®program from Merative (formerly IBM Watson Health). The program will be integrated within PINC AI^™, Premier's technology and services brand.

Launched in 1993 by Truven Health Analytics, the primary purpose of the 100 Top Hospitals program is to inspire hospital and health system leaders to pursue higher performance and deliver added value to their patients and communities. The program develops and provides scorecards derived from nationally recognized metrics and is published annually by Fortune as the 100 Top Hospitals, 15 Top Health Systems and 50 Top Cardiovascular Hospitals.

"For years, the 100 Top Hospitals program has set the standards for care quality and outcomes," said Michael J. Alkire, President and Chief Executive Officer of Premier. "Consumers view the annual rankings to help determine providers of choice, while payers use the data to select health system partners for value-based care and direct-to-employer contracting. Because objective measures of performance are so critical, we believe this acquisition will cement PINC AI^™ as a trusted one-stop-shop for healthcare cost and quality improvement. We believe we can build on the program's strong legacy as an honest, objective evaluator of performance, while leveraging our expertise to enhance and expand non-biased measurements to make a bigger impact across a broader swath of health systems."

In addition to the rankings, the 100 Top Hospitals program also provides organizational leaders with access to custom reports, technology to accelerate improvement and expert-led engagements to optimize performance.

"The acquisition of the 100 Top Hospitals program tightly aligns with the PINC AI^™ technology suite, consulting expertise and performance improvement collaboratives, all of which will work synergistically to enable health systems nationwide to deliver better outcomes and lower costs," said Leigh Anderson, Premier's President of Performance Services and the leader of PINC AI^™. "Because of the tight alignment with our mission to improve the health of communities, we anticipate that we will be able to rapidly integrate the 100 Top Hospitals within the PINC AI^™ platform. In addition, we believe the program's broad reach and strong brand recognition will enable us to build relationships with non-member health systems."

Effective immediately, PINC AI^™ will own and maintain the 100 Top Hospitals program branding, trademarks, web domains, scorecard methods and historic data. The program will remain 100 percent objective, scorecarding eligible facilities based on publicly available data, regardless of group purchasing organization (GPO) affiliation or technology partnerships. Scorecards will continue to be published by Fortune.

Forward-looking statements

Statements made herein that are not statements of historical or current facts, including, but not limited to, those related to the success of this acquisition, are "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements may involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause the actual results, performance or achievements of the Company to be materially different from historical results or from any future results or projections expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on any forward-looking statements. In addition to statements that explicitly describe such risks and uncertainties, readers are urged to consider statements in the conditional or future tenses or that include terms such as "believes," "belief," "expects," "estimates," "intends," "anticipates" or "plans" to be uncertain and forward-looking. Forward-looking statements may include comments as to the Company's beliefs and expectations as to future financial performance, events and trends affecting its business and are necessarily subject to uncertainties, many of which are outside the Company's control. More information on potential factors that could affect the Company's financial results is included from time to time in the "Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements," "Risk Factors" and "Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations" sections of the Company's periodic and current filings with the SEC, including those discussed under the "Risk Factors" and "Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements" section of Premier's Form 10-K for the year ended June 30, 2022 as well as the Form 10-Q for the quarter ended December 31, 2022, made available on the Company's website at investors.premierinc.com. Forward looking statements speak only as of the date they are made, and the Company undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information or future events that occur after that date, or otherwise.

About PINC AI™

PINC AI^™ is the technology and services platform of Premier Inc. (NASDAQ:PINC). With more than 20 years' worth of cost, quality and operational data gleaned from 45 percent of U.S. hospital discharges, 812 million hospital outpatient and clinic encounters and 131 million physician office visits, the PINC AI^™ platform provides actionable intelligence to help advance industry research, support improved financial performance and outcomes, and enable 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. The PINC AI^™ platform is also the data engine powering Premier's newest brands – Remitra^® and Contigo Health^®. With a leading network of provider organizations, the PINC AI^™ platform accelerates ingenuity and serves as a large-scale innovation catalyst in healthcare. PINC AI^™offerings and capabilities can be followed on Twitter and LinkedIn.

About 100 Top Hospitals^®

For more than 28 years, the 100 Top Hospitals program has been producing annual, quantitative studies designed to shine a light on the nation's highest performing hospitals and health systems. Research is based on clinical, operational and patient perception-of-care measures that form a balanced scorecard. To increase understanding of trends in specific areas of the healthcare industry, the program includes:

100 Top Hospitals: Annually recognizes the 100 top-rated hospitals in the nation based on a proprietary, balanced scorecard of overall organizational performance, and identifies those hospitals that also excel at long-term rates of improvement in addition to performance.
50 Top Cardiovascular Hospitals: An annual study introduced in 1999 that identifies hospitals demonstrating the highest performance in hospital cardiovascular services for four important patient groups: heart attack, heart failure, coronary artery bypass graft and percutaneous coronary intervention.
15 Top Health Systems: An annual study introduced in 2009 that provides an objective measure of health system performance overall and offers insight into the ability of a system's member hospitals to deliver consistent top performance across the communities they serve, all based on our national health system scorecard.

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Premier Inc. Acquires 100 Top Hospitals® Program