Hospital-acquired infections fall from 2015-2023

New data show that hospital-acquired infections dropped 27% between 2015 and 2023, going from 1 in 31 patients having at least one HAI in 2015 to 1 in 38 patients in 2023.

A New England Journal of Medicine study based on CDC survey data found that the percent of inpatients with at least one hospital-acquired infection fell from 3.2% in 2015 to 2.6% in 2023. Despite that progress, more than 471,000 U.S. inpatients had at least one HAI in 2023.

Drops in hospital-acquired infections

Researchers said the biggest gains in reducing HAIs were seen in the following areas:

• C. diff infections dropped from 0.54% to 0.22%. Researchers attributed much of this improvement to hospitals using two-step testing, which is more accurate than one-step testing. In 2015, C. diff accounted for 15.5% of HAIs. By 2023, that number had dropped to 7.7%.
• Central catheter-associated bloodstream infections dropped from 0.30% to 0.16%. These infections went from acc
• Catheter-associated UTIs dropped from 0.20% to 0.09%.

The data also found drops in device-related bloodstream infections (from 73% in 2015 to 47% in 2023) and in the incidence of device-related urinary tract infections (62% in 2015 and 34% in 2025).

HAIs: areas of concern

While researchers concluded that the drop in hospital-acquired infections was likely the result of national HAI-prevention efforts, they added that work remains to be done.

A MedPage Today analysis of the study said that pneumonia was the most common HAI in both 2015 and 2023. Most instances of pneumonia were not caused by ventilators: 64.5% cases of pneumonia in 2015 were not related to ventilator use, compared to 65.7% in 2023.

Another area that needs more work is surgical-site infections. Between 2015 and 2023, the number of patients with surgical-site hospital-acquired infections rose slightly from 0.56% to 0.59%.

Pathogens behind HAIs

In 2023, researchers found that more than half of pathogens behind hospital-acquired infections were Staph aureus, E. coli or C. diff.

Data showed that while C. diff was the top pathogen behind HAIs in 2015, accounting for 15.5% of hospital-acquired infections, it had dropped to 7.7% by 2023.

By 2023, Staph aureus was the most common cause of HAIs, accounting for 13.8% of the infections.

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