Patient mobility for private medical services in the Italian NHS: A social network analysis

In the present paper we adopt a relational perspective to study patient mobility flows among regions in the Italian National Health System (NHS-SSN). The study explores how regional resource endowments and the efficiency of its utilization explain mobility patterns. Being patient mobility an intrinsically relational phenomenon, we adopt social network analysis (SNA) to explore patterns of patient flows among regions. We compute network centrality indicators to describe the tendency of certain regions to result recipient or sender of patients. Logistic regression quadratic assignment procedure (LR-QAP) was used to study at dyadic level the relation between regional structural characteristics and resource endowment and the probability of observing patient mobility flows across regions.