Abstract:This chapter focuses on health care applications of DEA. The paper begins with a brief history of health applications and discusses some of the models and the motivation behind the applications. Using DEA to develop quality frontiers in health services is offered as a new and promising direction. The paper concludes with an eight-step application procedure and list of Do's and Don'ts when applying DEA to health services. Throughout the world, health care delivery systems have been under increasing pressure to improve performance: that is, to control health care costs while guaranteeing high quality services and better access to care. Improvements in health care performance are important because they can boost the well being, as well as the standard of living and the economic growth of any nation. The quest for high performance in health care has been a difficult and intractable problem historically. Efforts to reduce costs and improve service quality and access have been only marginally successful (Georgopoulos 1986;Newhouse 1994;Shortell et al. 2000).
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