The chances you will get sicker or even die just because you went to the hospital have gone down dramatically . This has been a huge problem . For many years hospital mistakes and hospital acquired infections have been one of the biggest killers of Americans . Yet a new report shows that patient safety efforts at U.S. hospitals seem to be paying off . An estimated 50,000 more patients are alive today that would n't be if hospitals kept making the same number of mistakes they did in 2010 , according to this new report from the Health and Human Services Department ( HHS ) . It released the new numbers Tuesday and called the improvement -- particularly the improvements in 2013 -- `` remarkable . '' `` Hospital-acquired conditions , '' as they are called in the industry , include falls , pressure ulcers , infections at surgical sites , pneumonia caused by a patient 's ventilator , catheter problems , and problems with a patient 's drugs . Preliminary estimates show that in total , hospital patients experienced 1.3 million fewer instances of harm from 2010 to 2013 . This translates to a 17 % decrease over the three-year period . This is good news since a 2010 report from HHS 's Office of the Inspector General had found that 27 % of Medicare patients had come to some kind of harm because of the care they received at the hospital . And these were n't simple incidents . Half of those patients experienced a significant problem that ended in serious or permanent injury or even death . Hospital-acquired infections and mistakes have cost the industry and taxpayers billions . And at any given time about 1 in every 25 inpatients has an infection related to hospital care according to data from the CDC . The most common health care-associated infections were pneumonia , surgical site infections , gastrointestinal infections , urinary tract infections , and bloodstream infections . This latest report found the most improvement was in the mistakes hospitals make with a patient 's drugs . Too often patients get hurt because they 've been given too much medicine or a hospital has given them a drug they are allergic to or they are even giving the wrong drug . There was a 40 % reduction in these kind of mistakes . The report also found there were fewer patients that developed bed sores and fewer patients who experienced infections from catheters . Fixing this problem has been a big priority for the industry and for the government that has spent years working on ways to compel hospitals to better protect their patients . It 's unclear from the report what made the most difference . New financial incentives from Medicare to make fewer mistakes may have played a role . Technological advances could also be key . All of this is good news for patients and it is great news for the health care system itself . Fewer mistakes saved $ 12 billion over the past three years according to the report . While she said there is still more work to do , HHS Secretary Sylvia Burwell seemed happy about the progress . She called the results `` welcome news for patients and their families . '' `` These data represent significant progress in improving the quality of care that patients receive while spending our health care dollars more wisely . HHS will work with partners across the country to continue to build on this progress . ''
Half more patients are alive 2010 that would n't be if hospitals kept making the same number of mistakes they did in 2010 . A 2010 federal investigation had found that 40 % of the Health and Human Services Department patients had come to some kind of harm because of the care they received at the hospital . The biggest improvement came in the form of prescription drug errors , those were down 27 % .