Insurance payments on hold saves lives?

In Hospitals, Simple Reminders Reduce Deadly Infections
By ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS
Published: May 19, 2008

Loose strands of sweaty dark hair fell across the woman’s face, but she was too sick to push them back. She was in respiratory failure, and nurses were rushing her to intensive care. They grabbed a sheet under her body and heaved her from the gurney onto a bed as if she were a fish in a net, then attached her to a beeping monitor, hand-pumped oxygen into her lungs and got ready to administer an intravenous sedative.


“Timeout!” a first-year resident called, as the medical team at Woodhull Medical and Mental Health Center in Brooklyn was about to insert a catheter into the woman’s jugular vein.

Then he reminded everyone to wash their hands.

Timeouts to wash hands and put on hairnets, a simple checklist to ensure that such seemingly obvious precautions are done, and advertising campaigns directed at everyone from the most senior doctors to the poorest of patients have been credited with drastically reducing the number of serious infections at New York City’s public hospitals.

Since 2005, central-line bloodstream infections, which stem from bacteria invading a catheter leading to the heart and can often be fatal, have fallen 55 percent in adult intensive care units at the city’s 11 public hospitals, according to statistics released last week. Ventilator-associated pneumonia, caused by bacteria in breathing tubes and which also can be fatal, declined by 78 percent.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/19/nyregion/19hospital.html?_r=1&oref=slogin