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Over the past few decades, in OECD countries there has been a general growing trend in the prevalence of out-of-hospital healthcare services, but there is a general lack of data on the use of these services.

We defined a list of 303 indicators related to primary and community healthcare services in collaboration with 13 Italian Local Health Authorities (LHAs). Then, for each LHA, we collected and analyzed these indicators for two different years (2003 and 2007).

Out-of-hospital care absorbs 56% of all costs in our sample of LHAs. Expenditure on outpatients’ visits to specialists and on diagnostic examinations accounts for 13% of the costs, while spending on primary care (including prevention and public health) accounts for 9%, and for intermediate structures (including those related to …