St. Luke's Miners Hospital, Coaldale, is a winner of the Premier healthcare alliance's sixth annual Supply Chain Award. Premier, a hospital-owned performance improvement alliance of more than

2,600 hospitals and 84,000 other care sites across the nation, honors select member hospitals each year for achieving superior supply expense performance. St. Luke's Miners Hospital is one of only 29 Premier members to receive the award this year."Winning this award supports what we already know at St. Luke's," said Bill Moyer, President, St. Luke's Hospital - Miners Campus. "And that is that we provide clinical excellence in a very efficient manner. In addition to the Premier Award, the hospital was recently named one of the nation's Top Performers on Key Quality Measures by The Joint Commission, the leading accreditor of health care organizations in America."Supply expense performance is measured by Premier's SupplyFocus

http://www.premierinc.com/costs/tools-services/sls/supply-focus/ ®, the industry's largest comparative database of operational and supply chain cost information for acute care hospitals. Winners were identified using four industry standard supply expense ratios and a case-mix-index-based peer grouping methodology to ensure that organizations of diverse sizes and complexity were considered equally."Successful systems and hospitals recognize that in order to address the challenges of the future, they most focus equally on quality improvement and cost containment," said Andy Brailo, Senior Vice President at Premier. "The St. Luke's Miner Campus continues to demonstrate the ability to do both. Winning the Premier Supply Chain Excellence award is a testament to their unwavering focus, team work and commitment to the patients they serve."Supply expense ratios are supply expense as a percent of total operating expense, supply expense as a percent of net patient revenue, supply expense per adjusted patient day and supply expense per adjusted discharge.To be eligible, each organization had to submit four quarters of calendar 2011 data to SupplyFocus. With 40 indicators measuring and trending performance in cost and operations, SupplyFocus enables hospitals to compare supply expense performance to that of similar facilities and easily identify improvement opportunities.