By Healthcare Facilities Today

According to a recent blog posted on the Becker Hospital Review web site, the healthcare industry needs to do more to prevent hospital-acquired infections. 

While individual hospitals have successfully instituted processes that have made progress in eliminating human error, the progress has not spread as quickly as it needs to.

According to the blog, these conditions are preventable in that the industry has proven methods for significantly reducing and even eliminating their occurrence. Yet, we haven't experienced a major tipping point that has caused these efforts to diffuse throughout the delivery system.

In 1999, the Institute of Medicine published its now seminal "To Err is Human" report, bringing attention to the prevalence of medical errors within healthcare and the lack of an effective industry-wide effort to combat these entirely preventable occurrences.

The report estimated that up to 98,000 patient deaths occur each year because of medical errors, which include HAIs. The lasted report of this magnitude, released in 2009 by Consumers Union and the Safe Patient Project, shows the needle hasn't moved much: It estimated around 100,000 deaths still occur annually due to medical errors.

Read the blog.