Hospital-Acquired Infections Cost $10 Billion A Year

The five most common infections that patients get after they've been admitted to the hospital cost the U.S. health care system almost $10 billion a year, a new study shows.

One out of every 20 patients who are admitted to a hospital will fall victim to an infection they pick up while there, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. These infections can be serious and even life-threatening, and recent studies have estimated that as many as half of them may be preventable.

They are also expensive to treat. In 2006, in a bid to get hospitals to do more to prevent so-called health care-associated infections, Medicare stopped paying for patient care associated with certain serious health care-associated infections.

The new study from Harvard researchers, which was published online Sept. 2 in JAMA Internal Medicine, suggests that by focusing prevention efforts on surgical site infections, infections associated with the use of devices such as central lines, catheters and ventilators, and by guarding against infections caused by Clostridium difficile, hospitals could save substantial amounts of money.