Each year about two million patients catch an infection while being treated in hospitals nationwide.
And while many hospitals collect data on how many infections occur, they rarely make those numbers public.
Some legislators say this secrecy is preventing patients from deciding on the safest option for treatment.
Today lawmakers urged a Senate committee to support a House-backed plan requiring hospitals to publish their infection rates.
New Hampshire Public Radio’s Kerry Grens reports.
Based on national data sixty six hundred patients contract infections each year in New Hampshire hospitals and two hundred of them die.
Windham Representative Charles McMahon, a co-sponsor of the bill, said exposing infection rates would motivate hospitals to reduce them.
McMahon: If we reduce hospital-acquired infections, we save lives. If we reduce hospital-acquired infections we attack at its source one of the symptoms of the increasing cost of healthcare for New Hampshire citizens.
Lawmakers peg the cost of hospital infections in New Hampshire at over fifty six million dollars a year.
The bill’s prime sponsor, Manchester Republican Leo Pepino, said patients lack any decision-making power to choose the safest treatment option.
Pepino: If you want to buy a car, you check the consumer reports. If you want to buy furniture, you’ll check this and you’ll check that. Anything you want to buy today you can check. But one of the biggest things is hospital infections. And you have no way of checking a hospital to see whether they’re doing a good job or bad job.
Pepino’s bill outlines six safety indicators that hospitals would measure and report to the Department of Health and Human Services.
These include bloodstream infections from a central line insertion, pneumonia caught from a ventilator, and surgical wound infections.
Hospitals would also have to report how well they adhere to certain safety guidelines, like making sure surgical patients receive antibiotics.
HHS would compile the data and put them up on a website for the public to read.
Democratic Representative Joe Miller said having HHS in charge of the data was a cause for grave concern.
Miller: Identifying and counting hospital acquired infections is not a simple process. It is not as like just sitting at a fence and counting sheep as they jump over the stile. And the New Hampshire Health Department’s need to hire and train sophisticated personnel appears nothing short of Herculean.
Miller, a retired physician, says he agrees with the intention of the bill, but believes there are better ways to reduce hospital infections.
Miller cited New Hampshire’s healthcare quality assurance commission, which is working to identify the causes of medical errors and design ways to eliminate them.
Miller: And I question whether non-validated data on a website will either reassure or alarm inappropriately a public which is desperately seeking advice about hospital safety.
But sponsors of the infection reporting bill say the quality assurance commission is run by hospitals, and it excludes the public.
Hospitals are not necessarily opposed to reporting infections.
Leslie Melby from the Hospital Association says her organization supports transparency.
Concord Hospital, for example, will post its infection rates on its website sometime this year.
But Melby says it is uncertain whether simply reporting infection numbers will make them shrink.
Melby: The reporting does not necessarily directly affect quality of care, but it is certainly a reasonable adjunct to the work that’s being done by the commission.
Several states have already passed laws requiring hospitals report infection rates.
And New Hampshire is among two dozen others now considering similar reporting requirements.
