Each year, some 722,000 hospitalized patients will acquire a serious infection as a result of their care. A staggering 75,000 of them will die during their hospitalization due to the HAI.
Recently, in efforts to improve these numbers, the federal government has worked to tie hospitals’ infection metrics with Medicare payments. If hospitals continue to have high HAIs, they will see their Medicare payments reduced. Just in December, CMS announced that 721 hospitals nationwide were going to be penalized for their high rates of hospital-acquired conditions.
Here is a map and searchable list for hospitals who scored worse than the national average on different infection metrics. (Data from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.)