Synthetic indicators for public and private healthcare systems: a casestudy

The quality’s levels of healthcare services play an important role in improving the society and the quality of life of citizens. In Italy, the national healthcare system uses a large set of service’s indicators in order to increasing the quality and efficiency standard levels. Mostly, those indicators are used as dashboard, but often the dashboard complexity hinders the analysis speed. This paper has the aim of building a system of indicators for the public and private healthcare facilities evaluating the quality and appropriateness of services offered in primary care in order to rationalizing operations and optimize available resources. Through multivariate data analyses, such as Factor Analysis, we identified the set of indicators that best depict the main dimensions of healthcare quality, as well as the proper way in order to achieve an assessment model of performances. Those indicators are able to identify KPI (key performance indicators) that can provide global information on quality (composed by efficiency and efficacy), and also the relevance which each indicator plays in the healthcare service. The starting point of these synthetic indicators is a set of hospital data, all directly available in health facilities because they have administrative origin (our dataset is mostly deriving from Hospital Discharge Datasheet referring to the Apulian hospitals).