The efficiency in the ordinary hospital bed management in Italy: an in-depth analysis of intensive care unit in the areas affected by COVID-19 before the outbreak

Fabrizio Pecoraro; Fabrizio Clemente; Daniela Luzi

This paper is focused on two main data sources. The first one provides daily data on the diffusion and hospital infrastructure consumption during the COVID-19 outbreak. They are collected by the Italian Civil Protection Department and collected on several web sites [3] . The second information flow concerns data on hospital bed management. Administrative and clinical data produced during the hospitalization process are collected in Discharge Report Forms and sent by the hospital information systems of a single health provider and centrally collected by the Ministry of Health. They describe each service provided to a patient as well as facilities available and staff employed in the relevant structure. This information is aggregated and published in the web site of the Ministry of Health [14] . The data analysed in this study refer to the year 2017, the latest data published by the Ministry of Health. Moreover, data captured for the year 2010 are analysed to examine differences between 2010 and 2017 in terms of resources available across the territory. This study considers both the public and private institutes, excluding the private nursing homes. The datasets gathered from the Ministry of Health website [14] and the relevant analyses performed during the current study are available in the Zenodo repository [15] .