Quality and sustainability of the health care system

Abstract

There are different opinions about the quality of our national health system (NHS): in some rankings it is the second in Europe, while in others it is the 21st. The use of cost-related indicators, instead of clinical-related ones, leads to a severe downgrade of the Italian NHS in the European context. According to the demographic changes of the population, consisting more and more of old people and chronically-ill patients, it is necessary to develop and use clinical process indicators proposed by the scientific societies, thus abandoning the Hospital Discharge File as the clinical quality assessment system: the reduction of the costs shall not be considered a good result without an increase in clinical effectiveness. The use of information flows through the informatics improvement of the so-called “big data”, and the crosscheck of data may be a great help for the development of this process. The Italian NHS will be saved by a strong reduction of costs that starts from the diagnostic appropriateness and clinical efficacy. (Clinical_Management)