Spread of chronic diseases: Online cartography

For the government and public health management, knowledge about the number of patients suffering from chronic diseases, their consumption of resources, the amount and type of services required by one chronic compared to another and their care burden for primary care is becoming increasingly important. Information on individual chronic diseases is not always easy to find, since there are no ad hoc information flows. Instead, flows of activity (SDO, pharmaceutical, specialist...), born for administrative purposes, have been consolidated for several years now, which today prove rather suitable for epidemiological as well as economic purposes. You are usually led to think that a person with chronic pathology, most likely, will ask their ASL for assistance the exemption for pathology; in fact, however, and the study on the mapping of chronic diseases confirms this, the database of exemptions cannot be considered exhaustive for this purpose, as often a chronic one, in order to avoid being “labeled” does not require an exemption or this is not required for all chronic diseases of which a person is affected. The intuition was to think that a patient suffering from chronic pathology, requiring a pharmacological treatment and/or hospital admissions and/or special specialist services, could be identified by questioning, according to specific criteria, the information databases of activities. This new study allowed to “recover” more than 50 % of people with chronic illnesses who would otherwise have been unrecognised. The study data, which are presented in this health report, are only a small part of the multiple results that emerged from the project.