Infections during hospital stays are not only discomforting to patients and very costly, they can be deadly.

The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate about 90,000 Americans die each year from hospital-borne infections. Another 1.9 million people nationwide who develop such infections endure longer stays in the hospital recovering and getting treated. The national health care bill for the 5% to 10% of all patients who develop infections is nearly $5 billion.

The Pennsylvania Health Care Cost Containment Council in Hamsburg published a research brief, “Hospital-Acquired Infections in Pennsylvania,” which indicated that infections in that state were associated with 1,793 deaths and $2 billion in extra hospital charges.

State politicians are mandating that hospitals report to their health-care agencies data on infectious diseases caused by patient hospital stays. Five states have passed such laws-Pennsylvania, Virginia, Illinois, Florida and Missouri-but none has produced a public report on each hospital’s experience. Legislation has been introduced in 39 other states, including Maryland and West Virginia.

The Keystone state was the first one to actually collect data from hospitals, done through the Pennsylvania Health Care Cost Containment Council (PH4C). Joe Martin, spokesperson for council, said acute care hospitals in his state are slowly getting around to reporting, with some clearly not doing an adequate job. “There is a huge variation in the data; 20 hospitals, including some of the larger ones, reported zero infections for 2004. No hospital has refused to submit the data, but the number of infections reported is going up each quarter.”

As an example of under-reporting by some hospitals, the PH4C said that 20 hospitals, which accounted for 25% of all statewide admissions, accounted for 50.6% of the 11,668 infections reported throughout the state.

It will be several years until the PH4C puts infection information about all 173 hospitals on its Web site. “It won’t be until we get more complete data,” said Martin. “The idea is that publicizing the data will encourage hospitals to reduce the incidence of infections.”

Martin said the PH4C i s expanding the data collection coverage from four types of hospital-acquired infections in 2004, to all surgical areas in 2005 and to the whole hospital beginning next January.

Martin gave examples of how infections are transmitted. They include health-care providers not washing their hands; catheters left in beyond the best practice protocol; intravenous catheters inserted in the groin area rather than chest area or neck vein; instruments being dropped on the floor and then reused; and the heads of patient beds not being elevated when ventilators are used.

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