COVID-19 and hospital management costs: the Italian experience.

Background: This article investigates the hospital costs related to the management of COVID-19 positive patients, requiring a hospitalization (from the positivity confirmation to discharge, including rehabilitation activities).

Methods: A time-driven activity-based costing analysis, grounding on administrative and accounting flows provided by the management control, was implemented to define costs related to the hospital management of COVID-19 positive patients, according to real-word data, derived from six public Italian Hospitals, in 2020.

Results: Results reported that the higher the complexity of care, the higher the hospitalization cost per day (low-complexity = €475.