Satar Rezaei; Nooredin Dopeykar; Mohsen Barouni; Mohammad Jafari; Fardin Gharibi
Abstract
Background: One way to improve the performance of hospitals, the largest resource-consuming units in the healthcare sector, is to continuously evaluate their performance.Objective: The current study assessed the performance of hospitals affiliated with the Kurdistan University of Medical Sciences using ...
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Background: One way to improve the performance of hospitals, the largest resource-consuming units in the healthcare sector, is to continuously evaluate their performance.Objective: The current study assessed the performance of hospitals affiliated with the Kurdistan University of Medical Sciences using data envelopment analysis (DEA).Methods: This retrospective descriptive-analytic study used DEA to assess efficiency types (technical, managerial, and scale) in hospitals of the Kurdistan University of Medical Sciences (n = 12) in the years 2007 to 2011. The number of active beds, nurses, physicians (general and specialist), and other staff were inputs; inpatient admission and occupied bed days were outputs. Stata version 12 was used for data analysis.Results: The mean technical, scale, and managerial efficiency values were 0.85, 0.89, and 0.95, respectively. The highest and lowest slack inputs were nurses and active beds, respectively.Conclusion: The findings indicate that Kurdistan hospitals were less than appropriately efficient during the studied period. They also suggest that there is a capacity of about 15% for enhancing output in hospitals (compared with the most efficient studied hospitals) without increasing costs or inputs.
Hamid Mohammadi; Mohammad Meskarpour-Amiri
Abstract
Background: Optimal allocation of resources commensurate with performance improvement is the concerns of all countries including Iran. Estimation hospitals production function is important in the economic management of hospitals. Objective: The aim of this study was to estimate the production function ...
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Background: Optimal allocation of resources commensurate with performance improvement is the concerns of all countries including Iran. Estimation hospitals production function is important in the economic management of hospitals. Objective: The aim of this study was to estimate the production function of Iranian selected public hospitals as well as analyze the economic behavior in use of hospital resources. Methods: The study was conducted by using the input data of 67 Iranian selected public hospitals at 2013. In this study, expected production level of hospitals and marginal productivity of inputs were calculated by regression estimation of Cobb-Douglas production function. Results: The results showed that a 10% increase in net working hours of specialized human resources in public hospitals would cause 8.8% increase in average production level of inpatient services. Moreover, 10% increase of active beds would cause 1.1% increase in average production level of inpatient services in the studied hospitals. Also, the production levels in 40% of hospitals were lower than the average expected production level and did not have full performance. Conclusion: With the proper utilization of human resources and beds, production level in a significant number of hospitals can be improved.