PROVIDENCE — Restaurants and supermarkets are inspected for cleanliness. So are cruise ships and food packaging plants. When they don’t pass muster, the headlines follow.

Hospitals, however, are not required to keep tabs on sanitation.

Yet the statistics are staggering. Nationwide, deaths from preventable hospital infections top 100,000 annually, making them the country’s fourth-largest killer, according to a recent study in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Each year, such infections kill more Americans than breast cancer, auto accidents and AIDS combined.

A bill requiring hospitals to report all hospital-borne infections within 72 hours is moving swiftly through the General Assembly. Wednesday, it received unanimous approval from the Senate Health and Human Services Committee and could be on its way to the Senate floor for a vote in the coming weeks.

Bill sponsor Hanna M. Gallo, D-Cranston, lauded the swift passage. After testifying on behalf of the legislation last month, Gallo said she was inundated with e-mails and phone calls from Rhode Islanders with stories about friends and loved ones who acquired devastating infections or complications as the result of hospital stays.

But there are those who question the bill’s effectiveness, saying it could divert resources away from where they are most needed: battling infections on the front lines.

Lifespan’s director of government relations, David A. Balasco, said that while the company supports the legislation’s concept of making hospitals safer, it foresees problems. First, the 72-hour reporting requirement could be hard to comply with, he said. Often hospitals don’t discover patient infections until weeks after the fact. Even then, they can’t always be sure whether the patient acquired the infection in the hospital.

If passed, the bill could also prove costly without being particularly effective, Balasco said. “My infection-control people are telling us it’s going to be a huge resource-intensive undertaking in order to comply with this law.”

A similar bill on the House side could remedy those concerns. Sponsored by Rep. Eileen S. Naughton, D-Warwick, that legislation would create, in part, a Health Department-appointed advisory committee consisting of infection control specialists, physicians and insurers whose job it would be to develop methods for collecting and analyzing infection data.

Legislation passed two years ago required the Health Department to conduct such a study, but the department never did, citing budget shortfalls.

A hearing on the House bill is expected next week before the House Committee on Health, Education and Welfare. Committee Chairman Joseph McNamara, D-Warwick, said he supports the idea.

“I think the more information people have the better their health-care decisions could be,” McNamara said.

cneedham@projo.com