The use of health information systems for planning community care

The health information system (HIS) integrates data collection, processing, reporting, and use of the information useful to measure and assess health and social care for improving their management. HIS has great potential to reduce healthcare costs and improve outcomes. In-formation may be used to plan community-based care interventions by identifying populations at risk, especially by com-munity healthcare professionals (e.g., family/community nurses). In Italy, HIS collects health and social information of individuals cared by the National Health Service. This paper has two main objectives: (i) to provide an overview of the main existing health and social HIS Italian databases; (ii) to describe the experiences of use of the information of HIS databases in the Piedmont Region.