Hospitals to begin publicly reporting preventable infections, deaths they cause

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Millions of preventable infections occur at U.S. hospitals every year, and hundreds of thousands of patients needlessly die or become severely diseased from them. And up until now, hospitals have not been required to disclose this information to the public.

But a new government initiative that threatens to pull a portion of Medicare funding if hospitals fail to start reporting this crucial information will have most of them in compliance beginning January 1, 2011, according to a recent report.

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