Extending the Cure recently published an article on the costs of health care-associated sepsis and pneumonia. If you've heard of pneumonia but are confused about what sepsis is, JAMA has posted a short summary on its website.

Sepsis is often referred to as a blood infection, but it is really the body's immune response to an infection at any of a number of sites. Health care-associated sepsis usually refers to cases of sepsis that are caused by infections acquired in the hospital. Mortality in patients with sepsis is quite high, and as our recent article demonstrated, a large portion of this mortality is attributable to the infections patients acquire.