New York-Presbyterian said in a statement it has made "significant improvements." Geisinger said in a statement that its infection rates have dropped since 2012 and that its MRSA rate appeared high because the hospital made a "data entry error" when it reported cases to the government. Geisinger also noted that many patients who test positive for C. diff never develop any symptoms, but hospitals still must report it as an infection.

 

Some major teaching hospitals, like Denver Health Medical Center, Duke University Hospital in Durham, N.C., and Mayo Clinic’s hospitals in Rochester, Minn., have been able to maintain low infection rates, the KHN analysis shows. 

 

Others are succeeding in controlling some infection types but not others, according to the CDC data. Yale-New Haven Hospital had lower rates of bloodstream infections caused by central lines, but higher rates of infections from catheters inserted into the bladder to remove urine. Since one of the main ways to avoid such infections is to remove the catheter as soon as it is not essential, the hospital now allows nurses to take them out without a physician's order under certain conditions, said John Boyce,MD, the hospital's director of epidemiology and infection control. "Busy physicians sometimes forget their patient has a catheter in, but the nurses know," he said.

 

Nationally, surgical site infections dropped by a fifth and central-line infections decreased by 44 percent between 2008 and 2012. MRSA decreased by a third during that period. 

 

Battling C. diff is very different than fighting Ebola and in some ways harder, because it requires hospitals to restrain use of the antibiotics necessary for so many patients. When those drugs eliminate weaker bacteria from the intestines, C. diff is able to prosper. Patients can get massive diarrhea and, while C. diff can be treated, the worse cases may require surgery to remove the infected part of the intestines.

 

Other infections for which the CDC tracks but does not yet publish hospital-specific rates, known as gram negative, are impervious to nearly all antibiotics.

 

Reducing the frequency of C. diff and these kinds of infections requires hospitals to become more judicious in deploying antibiotics. But only about half of hospitals have established stewardship programs that help doctors use the appropriate antibiotics in the most effective doses without overdoing it, researchers say.

 

"We have increasing amounts of data that thirty to fifty percent of the antibiotics we are prescribing are inappropriate," said Kavita Trivedi,MD, a consultant and former infection control official for California. "It sounds crazy to people who are not in medicine: Why would a patient be prescribed an antibiotic they don't need? But it happens frequently because we don't know what they need."

 

Data for individual hospitals is available as a printable PDF and as a CSV spreadsheet, and you can also view infections rates by state.

 

Kaiser Health News is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan health policy research and communication organization not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.