A methodology capable of determining the cost of healthcare provision, useful for establishing the right tariff and how much the treatment of a single patient affects the budget of a healthcare company. It is the one developed through an algorithm by a team of researchers from the Free Mediterranean University 'Giuseppe De Gennaro' – a working group directed by Francesco Albergo – and presented today to the press in the Auditorium of the Ministry of Health. Present, among others, were the Undersecretary of Health Marcello Gemmato, the rector of Lum Antonello Garzoni, the director of the Health Department of the Puglia Region Vito Montanaro and the president of the Italian Federation of healthcare and hospital companies (Fiaso), Giovanni Migliore.
The analysis – it was explained during the meeting – is the result of an investigation which since 2017 has monitored around 50 pathologies in 4 local health authorities and 2 polyclinics in Puglia. As a result, the tariffs currently in force are not balanced. Healthcare companies are the first to be aware of the economic balance to be maintained and therefore interested in this algorithm which works on the minutes of assistance from the pre-hospitalization phase to the one following an intervention. And if current tariffs appear generally underestimated, the issue also concerns the distribution of resources at national and regional level.
Gemmato underlined how the new algorithm can represent “a tool that helps to carry out correct planning, to optimize the performance of the national public health system and to create new organizational models. We must not forget that our public NHS is 45 years old, it has need for a review and new organizational models. The fact of being able to parameterize each performance in depth offers an extraordinary opportunity for innovation and sustainability”.
Garzoni thanked the Puglia Region for “the attention towards the study begun in 2017” and then highlighted the role of the university which “must support the business system and institutions with field research that can improve performances”. The tariff system currently in Italy, that of the DRG (homogeneous grouping of diagnoses), according to Albergo “is today inadequate because the real cost of hospital healthcare provision has never been determined. The research work of the Lum University – he said – has had the aim of determining a methodology capable of determining exactly the cost of the service from North to South of Italy and in all hospital facilities”.
Albergo then thanked “Novartis for having accompanied Lum in this objective and GPi for having created software capable of determining costs”. He therefore hoped that the study “can get the right attention from the Ministry of Health, so that the research represents an important solution for improving healthcare costs throughout Italy”.
For Montanaro “it is important, especially for the Southern Regions, to demonstrate that the value of the DRG is not exactly consistent with the production components, especially with the prices and costs updated to date. The model developed by Lum is an element which will allow us to represent to the central Government the need to remodulate the criteria for determining tariffs”. A Region like “Puglia will have the possibility of being able to redefine the tariffs of a series of services – he concluded – in particular those of services social and health care, in order to make them absolutely identical for any healthcare setting”.
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