ABSTRACT

This chapter evaluates the effect of both income and income distribution on acute hospitalisation rates and the effect of income on the use of hospital resources which is conducted in Rome, Italy. Data on hospitalisations were taken from the Lazio Region Hospital Information System, which since 1995 has collected data on all hospital discharges in the Lazio region. A deterministic record linkage procedure was used to link the individual codes of the Rome Census Bureau to the episodes of hospitalisation in order to attribute the census tract code and the income aggregated by census tract to discharge records. The Pearson coefficient was used to examine the presence of a linear correlation between district-level hospitalisation rate and: mean per capita income; the Gini coefficient; and the decile ratio. As a consequence, both hospital case mix and income level should be taken into account by hospital financing systems.