According to a report released on Monday by the Niagara Health Quality Coalition, hospital mortality rates continue to drop across New York, while the number of hospital infections is increasing.

The 2008 New York State Hospital Report Card also reveals there is great variation in quality between and within hospitals for most types of care.

The report analyzed data from 2006 on deaths, inappropriate numbers of procedures and patient safety measures in 31 areas of care, including infection rates due to medical care, heart bypass surgery deaths and numbers of C-section deliveries.

Overall, the analysis found that hospitals are improving, meaning that New Yorkers are less likely to die from having hospital procedures than they were a few years ago. The mortality rate of 8.5 percent for eight inpatient procedures in 2002 dropped to 7.4 percent in 2006.

The bad part is that about 3,200 of 1.45 million cases resulted in a hospital-acquired infection in New York, up from about 2,900 out of 1.48 million the year before, despite efforts at many facilities to make infection control a priority.

Patients and their families are given the possibility to access the report online to compare hospitals for different procedures.

The new report adds to that released last week by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which is also designed to answer people’s questions about hospitals’ efficiency. Anyone surfing over www.hospitalcompare.hhs.gov “can use this information to see how well their hospitals are providing care, and hospitals can use the data to focus on areas where there is opportunity to improve quality of care,” Kerry Weems, acting administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said at the time.