Table 3 Description of the type of service

Hospital admissions

Costs for ordinary and day hospital admissions. It includes all the costs for inpatients and is measured through DRG system

Pharmaceutical

Costs for drugs distributed directly or through local private chemists

Outpatient visits and examinations

It includes the costs for specialist visits in hospital and ambulatory facilities, diagnostic exams and laboratory exams to outpatients

General Practitioners (including night service)

It includes the costs for General Practitioners, General Practitioners for children under 14 (“Pediatri di Libera Scelta” in the INHS) and 24 hours, night service

Admissions of elderly people to residential structures

Costs for institutionalization of old people (>65) in intermediate facilities and for access to daily structures, including healthcare assistance

Mental healthcare

Costs for institutionalization and ambulatory services for mental care. It does not include neuro-psychiatry (included in mother and child) and dependencies

Prevention, public health and screening

Costs for screening programs (e.g. Colon-rectum cancer and breast cancer) and more general expenditure for illness prevention managed by LHAs

Emergency services

It includes emergency departments and ambulance services

Rehabilitation

Costs for long term care in residential, intermediate structures and in ambulatory facilities. It does not include assistance in hospital departments for inpatients (included in hospital admissions)

Disabled people

Costs for institutionalization of disabled people in residential structures and ambulatory services, including eventual vouchers to be spent by disabled people

Prosthesis

Costs for providing and managing prosthesis

Home healthcare

Mono-professional or multi-professional (eg. GPs, nurses, specialists) home care

Mother and child

Costs for ambulatory services including family planning clinics, neuro-psychiatry for children and community support to lone parents

Dependencies

It includes ambulatory services for dependencies.

Hospice

Costs for admissions in hospice structures

Overall cost per inhabitant

Full costing for citizens’ healthcare. It includes administrative and general costs (eg. Costs for LHAs’ top managers), which are shared in percentage to all the other services. It also includes eventual health expenditure deficits (which have an average value within our sample of 2.5% of the overall expenditure) [28].