Health reform includes lots of initiatives to improve hospital quality and bring down Medicare costs. Here’s one area that some experts want to address. This chart from the Agency for Health Research and Quality (AHRQ) shows that the number of hospital stays principally for septicemia (sometimes colloquially called “blood poisoning) more than doubled between 2000 and 2009 (337,100 to 836,000 admissions) – making it the sixth most common reason for hospitalization in 2009. The most common reason (one out of five hospitalizations) was because of a complication from a device, implant, or graft. The in-hospital death rate was 16 percent in 2009 – more than eight times as high as for all other hospital stays.
