Premier national quality improvement initiative, QUEST, has reported savings of approximately $11.65 billion through process improvements and analytics, according to its new whitepaper.

In addition to the savings, QUEST also reported preventing over 135,000 deaths in the last five years.

QUEST was launched in 2008, and has since grown to include 350 hospitals. In the last five years, while hospital costs nationwide have increased by 37%, QUEST has maintained them to 14% with no increase reported in the last year.

QUEST has benefitted by identifying areas that need improvement, followed by gathering the required data and developing a comprehensive plan to tackle those areas. Furthermore, QUEST prevented over 40,000 readmissions since 2011, and prevented nearly 18,000 instances of harm, such as hospital-acquired infections since 2010.

“QUEST accelerates quality and cost improvement efforts by creating an open forum to test ideas and scale positive change,” said Harold Berenzweig, M.D., executive vice president at Texas Health Resources, a QUEST member in Arlington, Texas. “By comparing our data with others, we can clearly see where performance gaps may exist. We then work together to rethink the status quo way of providing care.”

It uses  friendly competitions such as “race to the top” and “90-day sprints,” to quickly improve a particular quality measure, focused collaboration and other methods.

Last year, QUEST reported that its members had saved over $9 billion by reducing infections through data sharing and best practices. Additionally, it has implemented new processes in order to improve patient experience and other quality measures.

Premier and IBM partnered, in 2011, to create a platform that allows for easy data exchange between facilities.

Texas Children’s Hospital has also focused its quality improvement efforts on data usage. Starting with treatment of acute asthma, it is using a similar investigative approach to care for appendectomy, pneumonia and other common cases.