Multi-state models for hospitalizations of heart failure patients in Trieste

In Italy, heart failure (HF) is the most common clinical diagnosis among people over 65 and about 80,000 new cases per year are recorded [1]. This is a chronic condition whose incidence is strictly connected with age. A very flexible tool for modelling the chronic nature of this disease is multi-state model. Multi-state models are based on continuous time stochastic process, that can have Markov or semi-Markov property. In this presentation we show a multi-state model in which the states are the admission from and discharge to the first five hospitalizations, and death, an absorbing state. This representation aims at describing the main characteristics of heart failure patients’ hospitalization progression considering various covariates recorded.