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FL will release hospital infection data

Patient Safety Monitor Alert, March 3, 2005

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Florida residents will be able to compare how well hospitals in the state prevent infections beginning in January 2006, according to an Orlando Sentinel article.

At first, the report will only detail how well hospitals comply with certain prevention measures, including what percentage of surgical patients receive a required dose of antibiotics within one hour of their operations.

The state plans to release later in 2006 additional statistics about how many people are infected at individual hospitals. To do so, officials first must decide which infections to monitor. Hospitals will need to collect this data uniformly and send it to the state, and the state will take into account the differences between hospitals.

"If we just collected raw infection rates from hospitals and published it, it could be very misleading," said Jonathan Burns, spokesman for the state Agency for Health Care Administration, which is overseeing the data collection and release.

For example, large urban hospitals that treat the sickest patients and perform high-risk procedures will have higher infection rates than suburban hospitals that do not handle the same types of cases, he says.

To read the complete Orlando Sentinel article, click here.

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