Use of health services, provision of medical care, surgical operations and drug consumption are not sufficient to obtain an accurate estimate of morbidity but can complement data provided by other sources of information.

• Medication use: it should be presented as ratio of anatomical therapeutic chemical (ATC) and defined daily dose (DDD)/1000 inhabitants/day or, in case of in-hospital drug administration, as DDD per 100 bed days. Drugs are classified into precise therapeutic groups at different levels, according to the main indication in their prescription. In the long term medication use is not able to provide specific information as it changes with time
• surgical operations and invasive procedures: some surgical operations can be used as disease indicators. They are expressed as number of surgical operations divided by total population
• in-patient care utilization and technology: number of days spent in hospital for specific disease, mean and median length of stay, number of “brain imaging” scans, number of coronary angiographies divided by total population, number of coronary or stroke units per population.