http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/news/articles/0329hospital-infections0329.html

Pa. hospital infections drive up costs, risks

Ceci Connolly Washington Post Mar. 29, 2006 12:00 AM

WASHINGTON - Pennsylvania patients who contracted an infection during a hospital stay in 2004 rang up charges that were seven times higher than patients who did not develop an infection, complications that cost insurers and individuals an extra $614 million, according to a state analysis released today.

Patients with hospital-acquired infections spent many more days in the hospital, underwent more extensive procedures and were seven times more likely to die, deaths that many experts say were largely preventable. Though the findings were from a single state, industry analysts said the problem of hospital-acquired infections is universal.

"When people check into the hospital, they hope and expect to leave better off than when they arrive," said House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Joseph Barton, R-Texas. "But some of the millions of Americans who pick up infections each year are lucky to check out, and a few never do."

Doctors, nurses and patients' relatives have long known the risks of contracting an infection while in a hospital. But there has been little quantifiable data available on the cost of those infections from a financial or a medical perspective. The average hospital payment for a Pennsylvania patient who did not have an infection was $8,078, compared with $60,678 for patients who did, according to the report by the Pennsylvania Health Care Cost Containment Council.

Pennsylvania is the first state to require hospital reporting of infections; five other states have similar laws but have not yet collected or published results.

In a hearing scheduled for today, Barton said he will press for more public accountability.

"We don't know which hospitals are safe and successful any more than we know how much they charge," he said. "Consumers should have the right to find out just how well their hospitals perform."

In Pennsylvania, the 180 hospitals that reported infection data billed for an additional $2.3 billion. They actually collected $614 million for those cases because insurance firms negotiate discounts.

Some physicians said the medical profession for too long has accepted a certain number of infections as inevitable. When Chief of Medicine Richard Shannon discovered that more than half of the patients in Allegheny General Hospital's intensive-care unit who developed a bloodstream infection from an intravenous tube died, he said, he set a goal of zero infections.

By standardizing procedures and investigating every single infection within 24 hours, Allegheny cut the annual number of infections to three from 49 and reduced related deaths to one from 19. Shannon had similar success in slashing infections related to ventilators to eight from 45.