Princeton University researchers propose fighting hospital infections with matching government subsidies for every dollar a hospital spends on infection control. This incentive could drive down regional rates of health care-associated infections by motivating individual hospitals to be more vigilant.
Health care-associated infections — illnesses that people contract while being treated in a hospital or other health care facility — sicken millions of people each year and cost billions of dollars in additional treatment. On any given day, about 3% of the hospitalized population in the United States has at least one health care-associated infection.
Yet, these maladies have been difficult to prevent because hospitals within a given area do not necessarily devote the requisite resources to preventing infections. As a result, patients and health care workers — who can travel freely between facilities — can spread infections from one hospital to another, even if some of these facilities are more vigilant than others in controlling infections.
Princeton University researchers proposed a plan whereby hospitals receive a government subsidy that matches dollar-to-dollar the amount of money spent on infection control. Published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the paper calls for targeting subsidies to hospitals within a multi-hospital area that have the lowest infection rates.
Co-author Ramanan Laxminarayan, a senior research scholar in Princeton’s High Meadows Environmental Institute, said that incentivizing infection control would reduce infections within a given region by motivating individual hospitals to strengthen their own preventive measures.
