Infections and other medical errors that harm patients in hospitals have declined significantly, the Obama administration announced Tuesday, hailing the progress as a sign that new efforts to improve patients' safety are bearing fruit.
From 2010 to 2013, so-called hospital-acquired conditions declined 17%, according to a new report from the Department of Health and Human Services.
That is far short of the administration's goal of reducing these conditions by 40% over three years.
But administration officials said the declines resulted in about 50,000 fewer deaths and savings of some $12 billion.
"Today's results are welcome news for patients and their families," said Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell. "These data represent significant progress in improving the quality of care that patients receive while spending our healthcare dollars more wisely. HHS will work with partners across the country to continue to build on this progress."
The improvement initiative, which the administration kicked off in 2011 with funding from the Affordable Care Act, was driven by growing concern about widespread quality problems in U.S. healthcare.
According to one study published in the journal Health Affairs, an estimated 1 in 3 hospital patients experienced an "adverse event" such as being given the wrong medication, acquiring an infection or receiving the wrong surgical procedure.
Over the last several years, hospitals have worked with the federal government, patient advocates and others to cut errors, spurred in part by new financial incentives designed to reward quality and cut down costly hospital readmissions.
The new declines were hailed by American Hospital Assn. Chief Executive Rich Umbdenstock.
But the Obama administration effort -- called the Partnership for Patients -- has come under sharp criticism from several leading quality improvement advocates, who have questioned how the administration is gathering data and evaluating the impact of the multibillion-dollar initiative.
"Weak study design and and methods, combined with a lack of transparency and rigor in evaluation, make it difficult to determine whether the program improved care," Dr. Peter Pronovost of Johns Hopkins Medicine and Dr. Ashish K. Jha of the Harvard School of Public Health noted in a recent perspective in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Twitter: @noamlevey
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