A new committee of high-profile business, press, medical, and health insurance professionals is demanding that hospitals come clean with their infection data – information that is not publicly disclosed in most states.

Betsy McCaughey, a former lieutenant governor of New York and founder of the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths, says the risk of contracting an infection in a hospital is as high now as it was 30 years ago.

Improving basic hygiene, she argues, could save thousands of lives and millions of dollars for the cash-strapped industry.

“Someone who is going into the hospital for a Cesarean section or a knee replacement or an angioplasty should not have to worry about losing their life or becoming permanently disabled,” said Ms. McCaughey, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank, and a Ph.D. in health policy.

“Hospital infections kill more people than almost anything else in the United States,” she said. “It’s the fourth-largest killer, more than AIDS, more than breast cancer, more than auto accidents. The economic costs of these infections are staggering. At a time when people are so concerned about soaring health care costs, here are costs that are largely needless because these infections are largely preventable.”

She said she founded RID because she had met too many people who had lost a loved one due to an infection received in a hospital.

“I drove up to see Pat Moore, a mother who lost her 28-year-old son, Brad. Brad was mugged, but it wasn’t the terrible beating that killed him. After struggling for weeks to survive brain damage, he contracted a staph infection in the hospital. It was that hospital infection that killed him.

“Pat said to me, as we sat in the kitchen looking through her family albums, ‘I am only one voice, one mother, but I know that hospitals can lower their infection rates by implementing simple practices such as hand-washing. This problem has been ignored too long.'” Ms. McCaughey hospital infections kill more than 90,000 people a year.

The committee has a cross section of big-name members like journalist Tina Brown, Yale Medical School professor Dr. Sherwin Nuland, clothing-store mogul Sy Syms, and sportscaster Jeremy Schaap, whose father, ABC sports commentator Dick Schaap, died from an infection in 2001 in Lenox Hill Hospital after undergoing standard hip replacement surgery.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 90,000 people nationwide die each year from infections contracted in hospitals. Surveys also show that doctors fail to wash their hands 52% of the time before seeing patients.

The infections come from a variety of sources, including catheters, intravenous tubes, and poor ventilation systems. There is also evidence that presurgery antibiotics, which help prevent infection, are often not administered properly, further exacerbating antibiotic resistance problems.

Having hospitals publicly disclose infection rates, Ms. McCaughey said, will allow patients, health insurers, and employers who buy large company health plans to shop around. The model, which uses “market forces” to get hospitals to address the problem, is also being pushed by some groups in England, where hospital-acquired infections have become front-page news.

“Hospitals are advertising for our business,” Ms. McCaughey told The New York Sun. “They need to know that we will give our business to the hospitals that make infection control a priority.”

Industry sources said there is an aggressive movement under way to improve hospital hygiene.

Last year, for example, the CDC issued a list of recommendations that most hospitals have voluntarily adopted. The guidelines include requiring staff to keep fingernails short and to remove certain types of jewelry like rings, which are known petri dishes, as well as increasing the use of alcohol based rubs for hand-washing.

Hospitals have long argued that disclosing raw numbers is not an accurate reporting method because factors like patient age and condition complicate matters. They have also said devising an accurate formula that adjusts for risk is more challenging than it seems. They insist they are already working with several federal agencies, but say they welcome the additional input.

“Hospitals have this high, high up on their priority list,” said the vice president of quality patient safety at the Greater New York Hospital Association, Terri Straub. “They are in favor of more public reporting, they just want to move forward to identify the proper risk-adjusted methods for doing it.”

Ms. McCaughey said her committee intends to “invite” hospitals to cooperate in devising an accurate, easy-to-understand, risk-adjusted reporting system. But the committee, which will concentrate on New York facilities first, intends to lobby for mandated disclosure.

One source in New York’s medical community, who asked not to be identified, said the industry should focus on making headway, rather than on bringing in new groups, which could delay the process. He also said presenting infection rates without other quality control stats was insufficient and questioned whether relying on patients, who are in their most vulnerable state when they are hospitalized, was smart.