Pennsylvania hospitals are trying to slow efforts by a state agency to generate a statewide report card on hospital-acquired infections, a decades-old problem that causes many deaths and illnesses.

The Pennsylvania Health Care Cost Containment Council notified hospitals in November that it would begin collecting information on infections this year.

But the Hospital & Healthsystem Association of Pennsylvania, while pledging support for the idea of a report card, has argued the data-collection method proposed by the council has problems. Hospital officials made their case at a hearing before the council this week in Harrisburg, and the council has until Feb. 18 to respond to the hospitals' protest.

"Our discussions with [the council] are not about reporting or not reporting -- they are about including infection control experts in the process and refining the data collection so that the resulting reports will be of high quality," said Roger Baumgarten, spokesman for the hospital association. "Reporting is the right thing to do, but it must be done right."

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 2 million patients per year suffer infections in hospitals. Those infections are implicated in 88,000 deaths per year at a cost of more than $4.5 billion.

Infections were among the issues highlighted in a ground-breaking 1999 report from the federal Institute of Medicine, which called for action to reduce medical errors.

The clash between the council and hospitals over infection reporting comes six months after the groups fought over a state law that authorizes the council to collect data on hospitals, doctors and health plans.

In that earlier battle, hospitals asked legislators to change the council's data requirements because reporting was too costly. Supporters of the council countered that hospitals were actually trying to weaken -- if not kill -- the council and its report cards on health care quality and cost.

The council survived, but the Legislature's final reauthorization bill included changes in the reporting requirements.

While the debate on infection reporting continues in Harrisburg, the private, nonprofit Pittsburgh Regional Healthcare Initiative is reporting continued improvements in its project to reduce bloodstream infections in hospitals. Nationwide, those infections account for 50,000 of the 2 million hospital-acquired infections each year.

When the local project began in 2001, 28 participating hospitals in the region reported a rate of 4.2 bloodstream infections per 1,000 days that patients used central-line catheters. The rate dropped to 2.4 per 1,000 line-days for 23 hospitals that reported data in the third quarter of 2003.

Allegheny General Hospital, in particular, reported dramatic success in its coronary and medical intensive care units, where it reported no bloodstream infections in September 2003.

The catheters are inserted in the chest, neck or groin to deliver medicines, fluids, blood products or nutrition. Doctors and nurses can reduce the chance of infection by following certain practices when inserting and caring for central lines.

Bloodstream infections kill 14 percent to 40 percent of those who contract them. Fatal or not, each one extends a patient's hospital stay by an average of one week. Those hospitalizations have an average cost of $33,000.