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At the end of 2019, Wuhan, China, experienced an outbreak of a novel coronavirus. The SARS-CoV2 epidemiologic burden was constantly evolving, with numbers of infected persons, hospital admissions and deaths growing near exponentially. The pandemic outbreak of COVID-19 worldwide caught the health care systems in every country by storm and without a proper defense mechanism to cope and control such a pandemic, causing an overwhelming burden of illnesses that stressed the Health System capacity. In this context, telemedicine has been promoted and scaled up to reduce the risk of transmission. During the "lockdown", the AOU "Federico II" was forced to create peculiar pathways to ensure the safety of the patients and medical staff, and to keep an appropriate medical assistance, therefore it was introduced the telemedicine, wherever possible, by modifying the Information Technology (IT) related to the waiting times, rescheduling all booked visits and identifying several outpatient clinics suitable for telemedicine activities. In this paper the Authors reports their own experience with Telemedicine.

to evaluate the implementation of an integrated care model for thyroid disease on thyroid surgery at the University Hospital "Federico II" of Naples (Campania Region, Southern Italy).quasi-experimental design employing an interrupted time series analysis.all subjects who were admitted to the University Hospital "Federico II" for thyroid surgery between January 2008 and December 2018. The integrated care model for thyroid disease was implemented starting from January 2016.rate of partial thyroidectomies over all thyroidectomies; rate of diagnosed thyroid cancers over all diagnosed thyroid tumours; length of stay (LOS). Differences pre- and post-interventions were assessed employing Poisson (for count outcomes) and linear (for continuous outcomes) regression models. Models were adjusted for age, gender, tumour diagnosis (none, benign, malignant), Charlson index, and discharge month.data on 4,233 thyroidectomies were included. There was no difference between pre- and post-intervention trends for the rate of partial thyroidectomies over all thyroidectomies (pre-intervention: IRR 1.00; 95%CI 0.99;1.00 - post-intervention: IRR 1.00; 95%CI 0.98;1.02) and for the rate of diagnosed thyroid cancers over all thyroid tumours (pre-intervention IRR 0.99; 95%CI 0.99;1.00 - post-intervention IRR 1.00; 95%CI 0.99;1.01). On the contrary, the LOS reduced from 4.5 (±4.3) days in 2008 to 3.2 (±3.2) days in 2018. The multivariate analysis confirmed this reduction, estimated to be 1.1 days on average in the pre-intervention eight-year period (pre-intervention coefficient -0.01; 95%CI -0.02;-0.01), followed by an even greater reduction in the post-intervention three-year period which was estimated to be 1.1 day (post-intervention: coefficient -0.03; 95%CI -0.05;-0.01).the implementation of an integrated care model for thyroid disease contributed to reduce the LOS for thyroidectomies, improving the efficiency in the management of thyroid disease. However, this intervention had no impact in reducing the rate of total thyroidectomies.

In the era of personalised therapies, liquid biopsy is considered an important diagnostic tool in the clinical management of cancer patients. Tissue specimen represents the gold standard for molecular evaluation of specific gene targets alterations that lead cancer patients to benefit of a "tailed therapy" based on molecular features of the tumour. This innovative source of nucleic acids was introduced in clinical setting only for non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients to test epidermal grow factor receptor (EGFR) mutations when tissue is not available for a number of reasons (difficult access to the lesion, the presence of other disabling pathologies, especially in elderly patients, rejection by the patient, etcetera) or to monitor acquired resistance mutation after a first line of treatment. The present study aimed at assessing the diagnostic potential of liquid biopsy in balanced tertiary screening modelling. The cases relating to 5 years of activity regarding to molecular diagnostics performed on liquid biopsy specimens in the Predictive diagnostic laboratory of the University hospital "Federico II" of Naples (Campania Region, Southern Italy) were reviewed. Laboratory data were collected through the software SPSS. Non-parametric analysis was performed in order to test the differences between "wild type" patients or not. A multivariate logistic model was performed in order to assess the effect of mutation, age, and gender on the tumour progression. The results of the revision concern 515 total cases (almost of all plasma or peripheral blood), which allowed to evaluate the liquid biopsies for women and men. The average age of the patients is 66.3 years, and the 25° percentile is 59 years. The cases are: 221 basal and 294 by progression. The cases with mutation, as expected, have an odds ratio of 4,15, compared to the basal, to have a tumour progression (95%IC 2,7-6,3), regardless of gender and age. The detected mutations were 131 from different types of pulmonary carcinomas. Working on case data, specifying the characteristics of the patients with mutations will drive a further estimate in tertiary prevention screening designs.