Konica Minolta announced on Tuesday that it has signed a group purchasing agreement with Premier for its Exa health care IT platform.
The three-year deal gives Premier members in acute and non-acute settings access to special pricing and pre-negotiated terms.
"For the small-sized provider market, GPO agreements enable access to more competitive pricing and discounts that they may not normally have," Steve Deaton, president of HCIT at Konica Minolta, told HCB News. "For the large-sized market provider it consolidates the number of vendors and reduces complexity in the selection process."
Premier is a health care improvement company with a membership of approximately 3,900 U.S. hospitals and 150,000 other health care providers.
From a health care IT perspective, GPO agreements also enable the exchange of big data. Since Premier's membership is so large, data can be collected, organized and then dispersed so that it can be used in a meaningful way.
The Exa platform is composed of modules including PACS, RIS, EHR and specialty viewers for digital breast tomosynthesis and cardiovascular imaging. The modules can either be used as an integrated solution or individually, along with a facility's existing software.
The platform features dashboards that measure a facility's daily exam volume, its radiologist performance and the ordering preferences of referring physicians. Administrators and department managers can use that data to create customized reports.
Since Premier has such a large membership, it can play an integral role in providing data that can help the industry improve patient outcomes.
"They are in a unique position to collect data and organize it for meaningful use when it comes to treating patients across a wide spectrum of diseases and geography," said Deaton.
This is not Konica Minolta's first GPO agreement — in the past 10 years, it has signed agreements for DR with Premier, Vizient and Intalere. It also has a contract with Intalere for health care IT, and the solutions are also available to members of HealthTrust Purchasing Group.
