Hospital patients more likely to survive compared to pre-pandemic, study finds

Hospitals are building on progress in patient safety metrics, with patients more likely to survive conditions or illnesses that would have been deadly a few years ago, according to a new study.

Health systems continue to show improvements in safety compared to the pre-pandemic period, according to a new report by the American Hospital Association and Vizient. The report was released Thursday morning.

As many as 300,000 Americans who were treated in hospitals between April 2024 and March 2025 survived episodes that would have been fatal in 2019, the report found.

The report follows a similar study the hospital association released last year, and that projected an additional 200,000 patients surviving compared to 2019.

Dr. Chris DeRienzo, chief physician executive and senior vice president of the American Hospital Association, says the improved survival rates reflect the strides health systems are making in patient safety.

“When we ran this analysis last year, and the number for the year preceding was 200,000, that blew me away,” he tell Chief Healthcare Executive®. “And so the fact that it's even larger this year speaks volumes to the commitment of hospitals, and everybody who works in hospitals, to keep improving care.”

DeRienzo says the 2024 report found strong progress in safety metrics since the pandemic, and the hospital association wanted to see if those strides were continuing.

“The answer, unequivocally, based on this data, is yes,” he says.

Patients treated in hospitals during the second quarter of 2025 were nearly 30% more likely to survive, compared to patients with similar conditions in the fourth quarter of 2019, the last quarter before the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Hospitals also treated more patients, and patients with more serious illnesses and conditions, in 2025 than in 2019, the report states.

“It is absolutely encouraging,” DeRienzo says. “Despite seeing more and sicker patients, outcomes are even better. That continues to be true even relative to 2024.”

Health systems also fared better in reducing infections in the hospital.

In the second quarter of 2025, central line-associated bloodstream infections were 24% lower than in the final quarter of 2019. Over that same timespan, catheter-associated urinary tract infections dropped 25%, according to the report.

DeRienzo notes that the improvement in reducing infections is important, since health systems saw higher rates of infections during the COVID-19 pandemic. Healthcare leaders expressed alarm that infection rates worsened substantially, even with the challenges during the pandemic.

“Those were measures that during the disruption of the pandemic, I think a lot of folks were concerned about,” DeRienzo says. “And what our evidence shows is the efforts to drive ongoing improvement, this commitment to the systems and processes needed to drive continuous change, are having the intended impact.”

Hospitals are also doing more screenings for breast cancer and colorectal cancer, the report stated. Screenings for those two cancers rose 95% from the second quarter of 2019 through the second quarter of 2025.

While DeRienzo says earlier screening ages are a contributing factor, there has been a consistent uptick in screening for breast and colon cancer.

Hospitals nationwide should take pride in the improvement in survival rates and other safety metrics, DeRienzo says.

“Three hundred thousand more Americans went home in the last year because of the work that they and their clinicians, and all of the administrative teams that help the clinicians do their work, they are doing every single day, 24 hours a day,” he says.

“It is such an energy lift to a team to say, ‘We own some of that. It is our work that makes those outcomes happen,’” he adds. “These are friends, these are neighbors, these are family members whose lives are fundamentally shifted because of the work that they do. And I don't think we celebrate that work enough.”

Other reviews of hospital performance indicate improvement in patient safety.

The Leapfrog Group has seen continued reductions in hospital-based infections and other safety metrics.