[The general practitioner faced with the choice of hospitalization: an analysis of the data from the Follow-Up System...

The Project "Informatization of the General Practitioner" aimed at networking the work stations of a randomized set of 150 general practitioners equipped with the "Follow-Up System" software, for the collection of information related to the activity carried out, to be electronically transferred to a central unit was developed in the frame of the finalized Project of the National Research Council: "Prevention and Control of the Disease Factors". During the project activity, a study on prescribed hospitalizations was carried out. The contents of items regarding hospitalization diagnosis show that diagnoses concerning diseases included in chapter ICD-9: "Symptoms, signs and morbid conditions not well defined" represent 30.3% of the total; most of these undefined syndromes can be identified under the item "abdominal pain" with 18.2% of cases. Obviously in the case of appendicitis (12.1% of hospitalizations) the hospitalization carried out by the physician resulted to be necessary, in the case of biliary lithiasis (8 cases, 7.4%), the physician could have treated the patient without hospitalization. The interest of such data is to induce a sort of provocation in order to observe, within 8% of hospitalizations following abdominal pain, what rate of hospitalization could be avoided, giving the adequate support to the general practitioner in order to decide the behaviour to have.