Estimating the efficiency of the system of healthcare financing in achieving better health

Abstract

This paper contributes to the effort to model and measure how the method of financing of health expenditure affects the efficiency with which better health can be achieved. The focus is on the health system efficiency at the country level, which provides an alternative to the work done in the WHO in this regard. The approach uses frontier techniques as in the WHO studies; however the paper appeals to the economic index number theory of quantity and productivity indexes, which have well-established axiomatic properties, and provides a means for aggregating multiple health output proxies without having to attach arbitrary weights. This allows the proposal of a specification that embeds health sector performance in a broader index of economic inputs and outputs and allows for comparisons across countries and time. © 2006 Taylor & Francis

Analysis of the Efficiency Determinants of Health Systems in OECD Countries by DEA and Panel Tobit

“…Most studies evaluating hospital efficiency have employed a one-stage efficiency analysis, using DEA. Mobley andMagnussen (1998), Steinmann et al (2004), Bhat (2005), Spinks andHollingsworth (2009), Alexander et al (2003), Sherman (1984), Grosskopf et al (2006), Puig-Junoy (1998 and Retzlaff-Roberts et al (2004) are among such studies. Puig-Junoy (1998) and Retzlaff-Roberts et al (2004) are specifically among those that compare health care performance across OECD countries using DEA.…”

“…Sahin et al (2011) analyzed the effects of health transformation program on hospitals in Turkey between 2005 and 2008 by using DEA and Malmquist Index. For the period between 2002and 2006, Chowdhury et al (2014 have analyzed the performance of the hospitals in Ontario, and Chu (2011) did the same for the performance of Chinese hospitals using DEA and MPI. Weng et al (2009) in their study of comparing the performances of hospitals, proposed a Panel-based extended DEA.…”

Efficiency measures and productivity indexes in the context of university library benchmarking

“…Meanwhile, DEA has become a well-accepted tool for performance assessment, especially in the non-profit sector (see, for example, Fizel and Nunnikhoven (1993), Glass et al (1998), Mizala et al (2002), Hammond (2002), Ouellette and Vierstraete (2005), Grosskopf et al (2006) and Worthington and Dollery (2002)). …”

Effects of Health Care Expenditure on the Infant Mortality Rate and Life Expectancy at Birth in Korea

“…In a broad sense, Reference [2] measured how the method of financing health care expenditure affects the efficiency with which better health outcomes can be achieved. This allows the proposal of a specification that embeds health sector performance in a broad index of economic inputs and outputs in order to compare countries over time.…”