Using quality and socio-demographic indicators to improve the measurement of technical efficiency in primary health care
- Autores: José Manuel Cordero Ferrera, Eva Crespo Cebada, Luis Regino Murillo Zamorano
- Localización: XIX Encuentro de Economía Pública: Políticas Públicas para la salida de la crisis, 2012, ISBN 978-84-695-1574-7, pág. 16
- Idioma: inglés
- Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
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Resumen
The combination of the high levels reached by health care expenditures and the resource constraints due to the ongoing economic crisis makes the analysis of efficiency in the health care sector very attractive for both researchers and policy makers. The present study focuses on the performance of primary health care centres (PCC), which represent the main access to the health care system in Spain. The intention is to contribute to extending the literature on measuring efficiency in this context by considering conjointly the influence of quality indicators and environmental variables in a case study. Our dataset includes information about 94 PCCs in the Spanish Region of Extremadura. In particular, environmental variables are represented by patients´ characteristics and quality indicators are based on technical aspects. We apply different extensions of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) methodology. Specifically, we use weight restrictions to ensure that the efficiency scores assigned to the evaluated units take quality data into account. Likewise, we employ a four-stage model to identify which exogenous variables have impact on performance as well as to compute efficiency scores that explicitly incorporate this information. The results provide evidence in support of the importance of including quality information in the analysis so that the efficiency measures obtained are an accurate reflection of performance.
