Assessing the performance of public hospitals using key indicators: a case study in Chile and Ecuador Background: Continuous improvement, quality of care, and patient satisfaction demand the implementation of coordinated actions from all the healthcare personnel. They also require collaboration, management skills and attention to different dimensions to improve problems due to the lack of resources such as specialists, medical technology and infrastructure. Aim: To design and implement a model of indicators to evaluate the performance of hospitals. Material and Methods: The methodology used in this research included a review of the literature, data collection, conducting interviews, defining objectives and indicators, proposing a model of indicators, validating the set of indicators, implementing the indicators in a hospital, and analyzing the results. Results: The proposed model of 95 indicators was implemented in a hospital in Ecuador. The results indicate that 37 indicators meet the standard, 19 need to be reviewed, 10 show non-compliance and need serious improvements, and the remaining 29 were not informed by the hospital under study. Conclusions: The defined indicators are aimed to improve the performance of a hospital, are easily interpreted, can be measured without spending large amounts of money, and do not need excessive efforts to collect data, mainly if they are supported by information systems.

El modelo de asignación de costes de Varela-Laso et al. [1] fue aplicado en una facultad de una Universidad pública chilena. El modelo propuesto es una adaptación al sistema de costeo basado en actividades (ABC) presentado por Kaplan y Cooper [2] que considera en una primera etapa la identificación de objetos de costes intermedios, correspondientes a los diversos resultados de la gestión universitaria: docencia de pregrado, docencia de postgrado, investigación, administración académica, perfeccionamiento, entre otros.

Higher education institutions contribute to society in multiple ways through the technical and professional formation of the population and disseminating new information. This diversity of objectives that interact with each other hinder both the acquisition and the allocation of resources. In other words, they affect the institutions' capacity to meet costs at a given level of financing or income. For this reason, the costs attributable to degrees bestowed by educational institutions help to provide critical financial information, especially when computing the margin between income and expenses, evidencing the efficiency in resource consumption, and significantly aiding in the decision-making process. This article presents an integral and flexible methodology for designing an Activity-Based Costing system to determine the costs of degrees bestowed by higher education institutions applying the method to a Chilean public university. The results highlight nine degrees with a surplus and one with a financial deficit, the high impact on the cost of degrees stemming from the distribution of efforts of academics in the varied activities undertaken, the effect of grants among degrees, and other results of university administration, indicating the relevance of these models for the definition of government policies. Furthermore, these results' contribution in a current global context is discussed where institutions are found to be devising readjustments to their activities that have been affected by confinement caused by the global SARS-CoV-2 virus pandemic. Keywords: Costing in educational institutions; costs of degrees; activities-based costing in education; higher education institutions; Chile