According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention hospital mortality rates in the US were on the decline in the early 2000s, even as total hospitalizations rose. This came after a 1999 U.S. Institute of Medicine report that suggested tens of thousands of individuals died in hospitals unnecessarily each year. The report focused attention on patient safety in modern hospitals. About 70 years earlier, an organization in the American South was also concerned with patient outcomes. That's the focus of this episode of Stats+Stories with guest Melissa Thomasson.

Melissa Thomasson is an American economist. She is the Julian Lange Professor of Economics at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, where she has also been the chair of the Department of Economics. She studies economic history, focusing on the evolution of health insurance and health care in the United States.