Healthcare-acquired infections led to 48,000 pneumonia and sepsis fatalities and increased U.S. healthcare costs by $8.1 billion in 2006, according to a study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

This is useful data to have, albeit nearly four years old. Pundits probably could calculate what that number is today using complex predictive modeling, and the resulting estimate might generate gasps similar to the box office take "Gone With The Wind" generated in today’s dollars.

But the big question remains what the healthcare industry is going to do about it?

Better yet, let’s take a detour and hypothesize about solutions.

Let’s say we all managed to vibrate our molecular structures so that we ended up in an alternate reality or parallel universe. In films, television programs, novels and comic books, such a plot device is all the rage these days. In this parallel reality, everyone behaves, follows orders, obeys the rules of common sense, logic, infection prevention, etc.

• Surgeons don’t make mistakes – and they wash their hands all the time! Along with nurses!

• Sterile processing professionals clean and sterilize every tool flawlessly.

• Environmental services professionals makes sure all surfaces – walls, floors, doors, ceilings, counters, tables, chairs and even the air – are completely sterile.

• Supply chain management procures the products they need at the right time that are sterile and completely functional.

• Manufacturers and distributors produce and deliver these products without fail, without error and without bacterial passengers of any kind.

• Infection preventionists, freed from clinical and environmental fears, focus on product evaluations and how to maintain the sterile bubble that is the healthcare facility.

Would that reduce the number of hospital-acquired infections to zero? Or even cut it in half?

Absolutely not.

But does that mean the healthcare industry shouldn’t strive for the achievements in this utopian parallel universe? Absolutely not.

Yet let’s get real. No matter if we all wear a personal protective force field around us and do all the right things we won’t eradicate the infection rate. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. What we do today merely slows their level of progress. At least that’s the theory.

No one can account for the X factor – those bacterial and viral warriors inside a patient.

Following a global nuclear holocaust that wipes out all humans and animals, post-apocalyptic Earth will be populated by cockroaches and whatever germs mortally infected those attacking Martians in Jules Verne’s "War of the Worlds." So until we’re prepared to kill all the germs we’re nothing more than a bunch of revolutionary-minded resistance cells loosely organized around aseptic techniques and clinical and operational performance "standards" with flexibly defined precautionary measures and floating levels of quality.

But let’s be clear. We’re not emphasizing cleanliness over patients; we’re emphasizing cleanliness for patients.

From a dogmatic perspective, healthcare is distracted. Researchers can use high-cost, high-tech equipment to postulate how King Tut perished thousands of years ago; providers can erect Waldorf-Astoria-like facilities to make patients comfortable; payers can hike rates to pad profit lines when forced to ignore pre-existing conditions without the perceived benefit of added revenue from mandated coverage for the young and healthy.

United we stand; divided we fall. What unites the healthcare industry? Arguably, Obamacare’s net effects and emotional marketing. What divides the healthcare industry appears more clearly and in sharp focus: Information and medical technology, liability, risk, standards and cold, hard currency.

Unfortunately, Americans – since the mid-20^th Century – have deluded and deceived themselves into believing healthcare is a right – particularly taxpayer-funded, insurance-pooled services. But if the payer-controlled industry, emergent with the rise of DRGs in the early 1980s, demonstrated anything, it’s this: Healthcare is a business.