Hospital Performance Comparison: assessing inappropriate stay in the hospitals of Palermo.

Increasing attention is being focused on evaluating and improving inhospital health care quality and efciency at both the local and national levels. The present study is based upon 2006 hospitalization data of the eight hospitals of the Local Health Agency AUSL 6 located in the province of Palermo. The main critical aspects concern the appro- priatness of hospital admissions, based on the denition of "Inappropriateness High Risk DRGs " (D.P.C.M. 29/10/2001) and of 'sentinel DRGs'; the meaning of such inappropri- ate hospitalization is the inability to refer the patients to a more appropriate Day Hospital than a long stay . Results indicate that in overall AUSL 6, a percentage of 75,95% of the hospital stay were appropriate, while 14,79% were hospital stay with high risk of inap- propriateness and 9,25% were sentinel hospital stay; the percentage of appropriate stay is only 67,70%, if we restrict to the medical cases. We analyze rates of inappropriate patient stay in each of the eight hospitals, in order to assess their performances.