About UHC

About UHC

At UHC, collaboration drives success. For nearly 30 years, we have been a catalyzing force in supporting academic medical centers (AMCs) in their efforts, fostering new ideas, and building solid relationships that withstand the test of time. Our members have been agents of progress—driving the advancement of patient care, medical knowledge, and fiscal acuity by coming together to candidly discuss their ideas and vision.

As health care continues to evolve, we believe that AMCs and other health care organizations that deliver complex care will play an increasingly pivotal role. By combining the strength of your knowledge with our own and harnessing the power of health care’s most capable minds, we can overcome some of health care’s toughest hurdles. Together, we can create a world of insight and innovative solutions that help strengthen the delivery of patient care.

Harnessing the Power of Transparency and Collaboration

UHC offers you something unique. Transparency.

Each of our participating members openly shares clinical, safety, operational, and financial data. This information empowers you, allowing you to accurately compare your performance with that of your peers. Using our databases, you can directly and dynamically link insights gained from UHC members to leading practices.

To amplify your efforts, we analyze the latest advances in health care to help you improve performance in quality, safety, and cost-effectiveness. We hold regular conferences, meetings, and Web conferences and publish newsletters and other useful resources. Platforms are provided to discuss relevant topics, including changes in health care policy, emerging business models, and other issues on the national health care agenda. By networking and collaborating with the industry’s top thought leaders, you can play an important role in shaping the future of health care.

Elevating Performance

At UHC, we continually expand and strengthen our services to offer insights and solutions to our members. As the leader in providing relevant comparative data and as a single-source provider of information and insights that promote change, we’ve created UHC Intelligence™, a versatile suite of business tools that power performance improvement.

UHC Intelligence™ is composed of four distinct modules designed to work together. UHC Performance Intelligence® helps you elevate performance excellence throughout your organization. UHC Practice Intelligence® helps your medical teams perform at a higher level. UHC Safety Intelligence® helps make your hospital a safer place to stay and work. UHC Supply Chain Intelligence™ helps you link quality and cost savings. Each module is supported by databases, tools, and expert staff to crystallize data, best practices, and insights into a foundation for performance improvement.

UHC Performance Intelligence®

Tap into the breadth and depth of our comparative data and performance improvement programs to elevate performance and achieve excellence in quality, safety, cost-effectiveness, and patient care. Designed to work together, these programs provide the actionable solutions you need.

UHC Clinical Data Base/Resource Manager™ (CDB/RM)
How does your organization’s performance on clinical outcomes compare with that of your peers? This uniquely transparent database features data from more than 200 hospitals, many of which are listed as honor roll hospitals in U.S. News & World Report. The CDB/RM gives you a clear view of how quality, safety, and supply costs affect performance by department, by service line, and even by physician.

UHC Operational Data Base (ODB)
This tool provides meaningful comparisons of operational performance measures between institutions with similar characteristics. The ODB uses standardized Action O-I data collection and reporting tools from Truven Health Analytics, overlaid with UHC’s reporting capabilities. This powerful combination gives you an accurate picture of your hospital department costs and helps you identify ways to improve operational and financial performance.

Imperatives for Quality (IQ) Program
IQ provides strategic and tactical information for addressing performance in 6 key areas: coordinating care and patient flow, improving the patient experience, improving patient survival, managing cost and utilization, preventing patient harm, and reducing variation in care. Critical to making and sustaining improvements, IQ’s powerful drill-down features identify and connect you with top performers for superior networking and knowledge sharing.

UHC Practice Intelligence®

UHC-AAMC Faculty Practice Solutions Center® (FPSC)
With the FPSC, you can rigorously benchmark your physician practices—and physicians can even securely review their own data. With more than 200 million records and hundreds of performance measures, the FPSC lets you compare relative value units (RVUs), total RVUs, billed units per clinical full-time-equivalent employee, evaluation and management coding distribution, scope and mix of services, and much more.

UHC Safety Intelligence®

UHC Safety Intelligence® helps your organization elevate patient safety and pinpoint where risk reduction is most needed. The two integral elements of UHC Safety Intelligence®—the UHC Safety Intelligence® Program and the UHC Safety Intelligence® Patient Safety Organization (PSO)—work in tandem to improve patient safety, reduce risk, and decrease operational expenses.

UHC Safety Intelligence® Program
The only tool available for peer-to-peer safety performance evaluations, the UHC Safety Intelligence®, Powered by Datix® software offers real-time reporting of safety-related incidents, including events involving staff and visitors, environmental hazards, equipment safety, inappropriate staff behavior, security issues, and more. In addition, the UHC Applied Learning component of UHC Safety Intelligence® provides your team with expert-led Web conferences, aggregate data and analysis from the patient safety event database, best practices from nearly 100 organizations, and exclusive networking opportunities to share improvement information with your peers.

UHC Safety Intelligence® PSO
The UHC Safety Intelligence® PSO provides your organization with federal protection of data submitted for use in patient safety improvement efforts. This program enables you to automate your Network of Patient Safety Databases submissions, access a best practices manual for your Patient Safety Evaluation System, engage in peer networking through a secure portal, and learn from experts via Web conferences, case studies, briefs, and the exclusive UHC Safety Intelligence® PSO annual conference.

UHC Supply Chain Intelligence™

Combining our transparent data and advanced analytics with the national negotiating power of Novation (our supply contracting company), UHC Supply Chain Intelligence™ transforms the supply chain into a strategic business platform. We provide the complete solution for reducing total supply costs and improving overall supply chain performance while remaining focused on quality.

Sourcing and Contracting
With aggregated purchasing power of more than $40 billion, Novation is the nation’s largest group purchasing organization. Novation provides you with the broadest and most competitively priced contract portfolio, driven by market-leading efforts to achieve price rollbacks, cost avoidance, and price protection.

Data and Analytics
From identifying savings opportunities to driving performance improvement, our integrated data and analytic tools help you identify and realize the greatest cost savings. SpendLINK® is our market-leading business intelligence tool that not only helps you evaluate and benchmark your supply spend but also links to clinical data on resource utilization.

Performance Improvement Consulting
Top-tier performance improvement consultants help you obtain optimal value from all of your supply chain initiatives and enable you to transform opportunities into sustainable results.

Value Analysis Program
Our Value Analysis Program helps you implement long-term strategies for reducing nonlabor costs and improving supply chain efficiency. Participants consistently achieve a mean return on investment of more than 10 to 1.

Sourcing Advantage
Sourcing Advantage consolidates and leverages purchasing power for your affiliated faculty practice organizations, college and university campuses, ambulatory surgery centers, diagnostic imaging centers, and medical research procurement.

Fortifying Business Practices

From recapturing lost revenue to reducing nurse turnover, the knowledge you need is right at your fingertips. Following is just a sampling of the many tools we offer.

Revenue Enhancement Tools
UHC has developed numerous tools that positively affect your bottom line. For example, Charge Navigator recaptures revenue typically lost in your most difficult clinical cases. Using this tool and others, you can evaluate base rates, model what-if scenarios, assess counterproposals, and more—all in real time during payer negotiations.

UHC/AACN Nursing Residency Program™
This highly effective program uses standardized content and outcomes measures to help new graduate nurses successfully transition into the acute care environment. Participants develop effective decision-making skills and clinical autonomy at the point of patient care, learn to incorporate research-based evidence into practice, and more. In the first three years of this program, participating hospitals had an aggregate turnover rate of only 5.6%, compared with the national average of 27.1%.

UHC Research Institute™
The UHC Research Institute™ is a groundbreaking program established to provide the knowledge and insights needed to improve the nation’s health care delivery system. The institute offers an innovative research and development platform that evaluates opportunities to redesign health care processes and provides practical, tested solutions that can immediately be put into action.

The UHC Research Institute™ is composed of two tightly aligned and highly complementary centers. The Center for Economic Research and Strategy focuses on market differentiation and economic sustainability. The Center for Innovation and Clinical Effectiveness focuses on clinical performance improvement. These centers work together to both inform and support initiatives related to public policy and advocacy.

Moving Forward

The playing field is changing rapidly. Now more than ever, it is imperative that complex health care organizations band together to help lead initiatives that can positively influence quality, safety, and cost-effectiveness.

As a leading force in health care innovation, UHC imparts strength through collaboration—supported by research, tools, and thought leadership. Our transparency sets us apart, allowing unique insight and providing a powerful advantage to our members. And our involvement in national initiatives helps us pave the way for future success. By capitalizing on our strengths and working together to create a new model of leadership, we can confidently face the future.