Coming clean on hospital infections

This article appeared in
March 2010 Consumer Reports Magazine.

Here are the top and bottom performers in 10 states where hospitals are publicly reporting the numbers of central–line–related bloodstream infections in their intensive–care units. The number next to each state's name indicates how many hospitals we analyzed for that state. The infection rate shows how well each hospital performed compared with the national average for its mix of ICUs (cardiac, surgical, etc.). We included only hospitals that had more than 1,000 central–line days (total days that all patients spent on central lines during the reporting period). And no, that's not a misprint: The worst–performing hospitals in Rhode Island and Vermont have lower–than–-average infection rates—but not zero.