Network System for the Epidemiological and Economic Surveillance

Introduction


hat is ARNO?

ARNO observatory has been activated in 1987 with the aim of providing advanced IT resources to the local and regional programs dedicated to the monitoring of medical prescriptions. It is an on-line multicentric observatory, with an epidemiological approach to a population of almost 10 million of inhabitants.

The distinctive feature of this system is to offer to the Italian Local Health Units (LHU) a Clinical Data Warehouse with homogeneous data deriving from different geographical areas. The system has been conceived to combine and aggregate huge masses of data collected for administrative use for a single patient: general practitioner’s prescriptions, hospital admissions and discharges, diagnosis tests and diagnostic examinations. These information are linked to other data flows (vital statistics, health and social indicators) to build comparable epidemiological and economic indicators.


eculiarities

The main strength of ARNO observatory is its “epidemiological” orientation. Many efforts have been made to improve data quality, cross-checking of the original data bases (drugs, patients, physicians) leading to the creation of a population oriented database which assures a high degree of confidence to both general and stratified analyses.

Arno Observatory:
- is a valid system to study therapeutical needs of population and appropriateness of resources

- allows to monitor and verify the impact of interventions on quality and costs of assistance

- allows to highlight cohorts of population (children, women, elderly …) which need to be followed, evaluated and studied

- allows to evaluate, in accordance with groups of practitioners, problems existing in clinical practice (homogeneity-eterogeneity, therapeutical strategies, guidelines,…)

ARNO observatory is distributed through secure Internet. This allows the user to analyse data through drill-down procedures with different users profiles. The strength s the network of competence of ARNO Working Group composed by Local Health Authorities, the Italian Society of Hospital Pharmacy (SIFO), and Mario Negri Institute for Pharmacological Research, guarantees to coordinate the editorial activity and to promote case-control studies, analysis on chronic diseases and Disease Management projects.


umbers

Last update: July 2007
Number of LHU 30
Regions involved 7
Population 9.993.002
Number of General Practitioners
(M=48% - F=52%) (aging index: 147,7)		 7.928
Number of Paediatricians 1.180
Number of patients with prescriptions 6.900.375
Number of prescriptions / year 98.748.046
Longitudinally Data Base 640 millions
of prescriptions

Every year CINECA publishes different monographies, as outcome of ARNO analyses. Data refer to prescriptions of population of the whole Data Base and of particular cohorts of patients (e.g. children, women, elderly, etc.)