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Healthy Choices

Healthy Choices

Hospital-acquired infections cost U.S. $10 billion annually

By Cynthia H. Craft - ccraft@sacbee.com

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September 11, 2013 05:33 PM

You think you go to the hospital to get well – but many patients end up with infections they catch in hospitals, mainly due to unclean conditions or unwashed hands.

A study reported in the JAMA Internal Medicine Journal tallied up a cost of $10 billion a year for all those hospital-acquired infections.

If hospitals were to fix all the conditions causing these infections, that’s a huge savings in health care spending, not to mention uncounted lives saved.

To come up with that $10 billion, researchers studied medical literature from 1986 through April 2013. They excluded hospitals outside of the United States.

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Here are the five infections researchers focused on and the percent of cost they represented:

1. Surgical site infections = 33.7 % of the total

2. Ventilator-associated pneumonia = 31.6% of the total

3. Central line-associated bloodstream infections = 18.9% of the total

4. Clostrium difficile infections =15.4% of the total

5. Catheter-associated urinary tract infections =

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