Paul O'Neill Sr.'s words about U.S. health care echoed in my cranium as I sat in a hospital room surveying the tubes and monitors hooked up to my heavily medicated husband: "One in 14 people who go into a hospital will get an infection they didn't bring with them."

Not exactly comforting when a loved one is held together with staples from navel to pubic bone after abdominal surgery.

Just two days before my husband's operation, I had been in Pittsburgh listening to the former U.S. Treasury secretary and Alcoa CEO talk with members of the National Conference of Editorial Writers about America's health care system. O'Neill might seem like an unlikely choice of speaker on this subject, but he's been interested and involved in improving health and medical care since his days as a systems analyst for the Veterans Administration back in the 1960s.

He and his colleagues at Pittsburgh-based Value Capture LLP believe that systems analysis is exactly what's needed to not only improve the safety and quality of U.S. health care but to reduce the costs of that care by 30 percent to 50 percent.

Both in terms of dollars and lives, the costs of those one in 14 infections are substantial. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that nearly 2 million patients in U.S. hospitals get infections every year.

About 90,000 of those lead to death — more than car accidents and breast cancer combined. The price tag: $4.5 billion.

The path to reducing those numbers requires honest assessment of how hospitals are operating, O'Neill said.

That begins with the hospital's executive team directly observing the front lines of patient care. The hospital's CEO and his or her direct reports record problems — not in order to place blame but to assess the best way to solve those problems.

O'Neill cited Allegheny General Hospital, one of Pittsburgh's largest academic medical centers, as a textbook example of how such a process can result in measurable outcomes in a very short time frame. Allegheny chief of medicine Rick Shannon was determined to reduce the rate of infection among intensive-care unit patients needing the insertion of central lines.

By observing the caregivers' stand-ard practices and then modifying them to decrease the possibility of exposing the necessary medical devices to germs — put the protective gloves on the top of the sterile pack, not at the bottom — Shannon dropped the infection rate by 95 percent in less than 90 days. He has kept it that way for almost three years.

This exercise in observation, cooperation and learning has saved Shannon's hospital more than $2 million.

Value Capture's goal is to apply system theory to health care. Finding system failures and then making changes can result in significant differences in quality of patient care, overall safety in the workplace and bottom-line profitability.

But the onus for improving the nation's health care doesn't fall only on the people in white coats or the CEOs in the expensive suits. The consumers of health care must take ownership of their own health. We all need to be more engaged by observing and asking questions.

O'Neill took a quick survey of his NCEW audience: How many of you have ever received a prescription that you couldn't read? Almost half of the people raised hands.

A Harvard study by Dr. Lucian Leape, generally regarded as the father of the modern patient safety movement, provides the statistical proof of O'Neill's less-than-random sampling: More than 300 million medication errors occur annually in this country.

"That's more than one apiece," O'Neill said.

At best, something as common as an illegible prescription can mean that a patient isn't getting a medication that will alleviate the problem. At worst, the wrong meds can be deadly.

Physicians often defend their scrawls by saying they don't have time to slow down, O'Neill said. But when questioned about how much time they waste when pharmacists who aren't willing to guess about what's written call their offices, tying up administrative and medical staff in deciphering what was written, the doctors interviewed by Value Capture admitted that it would save time and money if they just block-printed the scrip in the first place.

"You have a right not to accept a prescription you cannot read," O'Neill said.

That sets up an uncomfortable dynamic for lots of Americans, who find it difficult to question the actions of nurses, much less doctors. But the stakes are too high to remain complacent or passive.

We all have a responsibility to be actively involved in our own health care. O'Neill summed it up well during his talk in Pittsburgh: It's time to "push back on the idea that we have to get what they give us."