The attention placed on healthcare systems has been constantly increasing in recent years. This is especially true for geriatric services: older people often have complex medical and social needs and the proportion of elderly in the population is currently rising. In this paper we apply the Coxian phase-type distribution to model the length of stay of geriatric patients admitted to 19 geriatric wards at hospitals in the Emilia-Romagna region in Italy for the years 2008–2011. The results confirm previous research carried out on patients in the UK and extends the research by allowing the influence of patient characteristics, available on admission, to be taken into account as covariates.