Though infections are just one measure of a hospital’s safety record, they’re an important one. Every year an estimated 648,000 people in the U.S. develop infections during a hospital stay, and about 75,000 die, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). That’s more than twice the number of people who die each year in car crashes. And many of those illnesses and deaths can be traced back to the use of antibiotics, the very drugs that are supposed to fight the infections.

Terry Otey appears to be one casualty in that ongoing battle. Three years ago, a few weeks after an overnight stay for back surgery at Providence Regional Medical Center in Everett, Wash., he went to the emergency room vomiting, dizzy, and with excruciating back pain. Bacteria known as MRSA (methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus) had taken hold in his surgical incision and quickly spread to his heart. He died in the hospital about three months later, following a cascade of serious health problems. “He just wanted to ease his back pain enough to play golf,” says his sister, Deborah Bussell.

Kellie Pearson, 49, a farmer in northern California, says she encountered a different kind of bug after having heart surgery last April. Her doctors prescribed an antibiotic in the hopes that it would prevent a postsurgical infection. Instead the drug killed off healthy bacteria in her body, and another germ, C. diff (clostridium difficile), swooped in, causing diarrhea so severe that she had to stay in the hospital an additional five days until doctors could rein in the potentially deadly infection.

She recovered but soon realized that she wasn’t the only patient suffering. “When I was able to walk down the hall in the hospital,” she says, “I was horrified to see room after room with C. diff caution signs on their doors warning that the patients inside, like me, had been infected.”