Costly, Preventable—and Sometimes Fatal
March 3, 2010
The threat of hospital-acquired infections (HAIs) is not news. Hospitals, policymakers and advocates have known for years: sometimes, patients can pick up dangerous infections in the very places they came to get well. Whether the culprit is improper sterilization in surgery or a dirty ventilator tube, the danger is real.
But who’s to blame when patients die in the hospital? They may have caught an infection during their stay, but many were sick before they got it. Was the hospital-acquired infection really at fault?
A study just released in the Archives of Internal Medicine is getting to the bottom of the question. Researchers at Extending the Cure (a Burness client) are for the first time discovering which deaths were caused by hospital-acquired infections – not just looking at how many people who had them also died. The numbers are sobering: sepsis and pneumonia brought on by infection killed 48,000 in 2006 alone, and cost $8.1 billion to treat. (These preventable conditions are only two of many commonly caused by HAIs.)
In the video to the right, Extending the Cure investigator Ramanan Laxminarayan discusses the study’s findings, and what they mean for doctors, patients and reformers. You can also learn more about the study and its results from this post in the Wall Street Journal’s Health Blog, or this one in the blog of Scientific American.
The fight against hospital-acquired infections won’t be won by data alone. But with solid information about the scale of the danger, we’re a step closer.
