Report Highlights | Hospital-acquired Infections in Pennsylvania 2006

Hospital-acquired Infections in Pennsylvania 2006 - Report Highlights

This report includes information on infections that were contracted by patients in Pennsylvania hospitals in 2006. It is the Pennsylvania Health Care Cost Containment Council’s second hospital-specific report on these types of infections.
Data on hospital-acquired infections is provided for each of Pennsylvania's 165 general acute care hospitals. Because not all hospitals treat the same types of patients, they were categorized by “peer groups” so that hospitals that offer similar types and complexity of services and treat similar numbers of patients are displayed together.
In 2006, hospitals reported that 30,237 patients contracted an infection during their hospitalization, a rate of 19.2 per 1,000 cases. This rate is higher than the 12.2 per 1,000 cases reported in 2005 due, in large part, to an expansion in the hospital-acquired infection reporting categories and improved reporting by hospitals as the process became more established.
Differences in mortality, length of stay, and average hospital charges can be observed between patients with hospital-acquired infections and those without, as shown in the table below. The differences in mortality, length of stay, and charges may not be entirely attributable to the infections. The degree to which the presence of hospital-acquired infections influenced these numbers is not known. In almost all cases, hospitals do not receive full reimbursement of charges; on average statewide in 2006, for all inpatient cases (not just infections), hospitals were paid approximately 27% of established charges.

	Number of Cases	Infection Rate Per 1,000	Mortality		Average Length of Stay in Days		Average Charge
	Number of Cases	Infection Rate Per 1,000	Number	Percent	Mean	Median	Mean	Median
Total Cases	1,574,170	NA	36,119	2.3	4.7	3.0	$36,001	$19,900
Cases with a hospital-acquired infection	30,237	19.2	3,716	12.3	19.3	14.0	$175,964	$79,670
Cases without a hospital-acquired infection	1,543,933	NA	32,403	2.1	4.4	3.0	$33,260	$18,538

The expansion of hospital-acquired infection reporting requirements from 2005 to 2006 restricts the comparisons that can be made between the two years; however, some limited comparative data is included in the report for the two most similar data collection time periods: Quarter 4, 2005 and Quarter 4, 2006. The hospital-acquired infection rate decreased from 16.3 per 1,000 cases to 15.1 per 1,000 cases between these two time periods. The number of hospital-acquired infections decreased from 6,226 in Quarter 4, 2005 to 5,859 in Quarter 4, 2006. (“Quarter 4” represents the time period October 1 through December 31.)
The collection and reporting of hospital-acquired infections is still evolving. PHC4 believes the most important use of the report is to measure individual hospital performance over time and as a tool to ask physicians and hospital representatives informed questions about infection control and prevention, rather than to compare hospitals to each other.