Health authorities in every state know that failure to get a good handle on hospital-acquired infections -- knowing what they are and at what locations they are occurring -- renders it all the more difficult to treat infection. Lack of knowledge translates into poor planning and readiness should an infection spread sudden and widely beyond a particular hospital, and certain infections are, candidly, deadly.

Our immediately preceding blog post traced the efforts of a coalition of California hospitals to reduce infections acquired in house, an urgently needed effort given that about 12,000 patients die annually from infections in that state's medical facilities.

Many other states are taking notice and seeking to improve their internal systems for indentifying in-house infections and duly and quickly reporting them to state health authorities and other hospitals.

Georgia, for example, is using federal grant money to create a program aimed at reducing hospital-acquired infections and for tracking them. The state currently has no law that requires such infections to be reported to any public health agency, and this worries health officials, because, consequently, Georgia hospitals share little infection-related information

To underscore the variance in identification and reporting systems among the various states, a quick look at what is going on next door to Georgia, in neighboring Tennessee, is instructive.

Hospital officials there routinely report infections acquired inside their facilities to the state health department office, from where researchers can quickly and consistently note what infections might be spreading and where they are coming from. Additionally, institutions that are exemplary in controlling infection can be identified, as can those that are improving their efforts and those that are falling short and need to be focused upon.

In addition to states' efforts, the federal government is also developing a national infection-tracking system.

Related Resource: Atlanta Journal-Constitution, "State health officials can't track hospital-related infections" Aug. 21, 2011