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The Toll From Hospital-Acquired Infections
The 2005 legislative session may be best remembered for an on-time budget and the passage of some reform legislation, but other important issues were addressed. One consumer protection issue tackled by the state legislature was the serious problems caused by infections acquired by patients during hospital stays. According to experts, infections acquired during hospital stays result in the deaths of tens of thousands of patients and cost the nation billions of dollars. One important way to begin to get a handle on this issue is to require hospitals to regularly report their infection rates. Advocates believe – rightly – that public reporting of this information will force hospitals to clean up their acts and work harder to dramatically reduce infection rates. Last month a bill passed requiring the State Health Department to develop a system of public reporting. The bill passed both houses with broad bi-partisan support and has been sent to the Governor for his approval. It’s not clear what the Governor will do. But if the experience of Pennsylvania is any indication of what’s going on in New York, the Governor should approve the legislation – and do so quickly. Last week, the state of Pennsylvania released the findings of the nation’s first hospital infection reporting system. The findings were stunning. In 2004, Pennsylvania hospitals reported nearly 12,000 hospital-acquired infections and nearly 1,800 of those patients died. It cost Pennsylvania’s health care system an additional $2 billion to treat patients made sick from these infections. And those numbers were only the tip of the iceberg. The state found that many hospitals failed to accurately report infection rates. For example, 16 hospitals reported no infections for all of 2004. And just 17 percent of hospitals reported half of all infections. The state conducted a further analysis to check compliance by examining the bills hospitals submitted to insurance companies. The state found over 115,000 instances in which hospitals billed for treatment of patients with illnesses that typically result from infections acquired in hospitals. Roughly ten times the number of infections reported to the state! Experts at the federal government’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have estimated that 90,000 American hospital patients die as the result of hospital-acquired infections. It is clear from the findings of Pennsylvania’s program – even with hospitals underreporting – that the CDC estimates are likely to be low. And the CDC experts have clearly stated that a huge proportion of these infections are preventable – often simply by hospital staff adhering to a higher level of hygiene. The staggering human toll that results from infections should alone drive policymakers to toughen oversight of hospitals. But the huge economic costs to the health care system are helping to drive up insurance costs and thus increase the number of uninsured Americans. Failing to tackle this problem contributes to the health care crisis in America. That’s why New York’s state legislature approved the hospital infections reporting bill. The bill now sits on the Governor’s desk. The Governor should not only approve the legislation but also order the State Health Department to accelerate the implementation of the new requirements. Pennsylvania’s landmark program offers New York health policymakers a test case on how to implement this new program quickly. The Governor should ask the people that run Pennsylvania’s program to brief their counterparts on how to get New York’s new law up and running quickly. Failure to act – or failure to act quickly – will cost New York dearly. Thousands of New Yorkers will needlessly die from hospital infections and the economic costs to the state will be overwhelming. The Governor must act. That’s all for now. I’ll be keeping an eye on the Capitol and will talk to you again next week.
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