WASHINGTON – Nearly 2 million patients develop healthcare-associated infections, or HAIs, each year, which cause 99,000 deaths and $28 billion to $33 billion in healthcare costs.

With those numbers in mind, the Department Health and Human Services has awarded $17 million to fund projects that will fight HAIs.

“When patients go to the hospital, they expect to get better, not worse,” HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said. “Eliminating infections is critical to making care safer for patients and to improving the overall quality and safety of the healthcare system.”

About $8 million will be used to fund the national expansion of the Keystone Project, which reportedly reduced the rate of central-line blood stream infections in more than 100 Michigan intensive care units and saved 1,500 lives and $200 million over the past 18 months.

The program involves using a checklist of evidence-based safety practices, staff training and other tools for preventing infections that can be implemented in hospital units, standard and consistent measurement of infection rates and tools to improve teamwork among doctors, nurses and hospital leaders.

HAIs are caused by bacteria that infect patients being treated in a hospital or healthcare setting for other conditions. The most common HAI-causing bacteria is methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA. The number of MRSA-associated hospital stays has more than tripled since 2000, reaching 368,600 in 2005, according to the HHS’ Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s (AHRQ) Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project.

The Keystone Project currently operates in all 50 states, Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia. The new funding will expand the effort to more hospitals, extend it to other settings and broaden the focus to address other types of infections.

The effort will provide $6 million to the Health Research and Educational Trust for national efforts to expand the Comprehensive Unit-Based Patient Safety Program to Reduce Central Line-Associated Blood Stream Infections, $1 million to fight catheter line infections and $1 million to Yale University to support a comprehensive plan to prevent bloodstream infections in hemodialysis patients.

AHRQ, in collaboration with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has identified several areas to apply the remaining $9 million toward reducing MRSA and other types of HAIs. These projects will focus on:

• Reducing Clostridium difficile infections through a regional hospital collaborative;
• Reducing the overuse of antibiotics by primary care clinicians treating patients in ambulatory and long-term care settings;
• Evaluating two ways to eliminate MRSA in ICUs;
• Improving the measurement of the risk of infections after surgery;
• Identifying national-, regional- and state-level rates of HAIs that are acquired in the acute care setting;
• Reducing infections caused by Klebsiella pneumoniae Carbapenemase-producing organisms by applying recently developed recommendations from the CDC’s Healthcare Infection Control Practices Advisory Committee;
• Standardizing antibiotic use in long-term care settings (two projects); and
• Implementing teamwork principles for frontline healthcare providers.