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Evaluation of Efficiency in Primary Health Care Centres: An Application of Data Envelopment Analysis
Author(s) -
García Florencio,
Marcuello Carmen,
Serrano Diana,
Urbina Olga
Publication year - 1999
Publication title -
financial accountability and management
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.661
H-Index - 44
eISSN - 1468-0408
pISSN - 0267-4424
DOI - 10.1111/1468-0408.00074
Subject(s) - data envelopment analysis , primary care , sample (material) , primary health care , envelopment , health care , quality (philosophy) , business , operations management , operations research , medicine , economics , statistics , engineering , family medicine , mathematics , economic growth , philosophy , chemistry , chromatography , epistemology
The aim of this paper is to analyse one of the principal problems in primary health care management: the evaluation of efficiency in primary health care centres. Given the special characteristics of measuring outcome in primary care it is necessary to evaluate the performance of centres from a quality perspective too. The methodology used, DEA (Data Envelopment Analysis), allows us to introduce quantitative and qualitative variables in a sample of primary care centres in a Spanish province. Once the efficiency of the different centres is known, we investigate the sensitivity of the methodology to changes in the definition of outputs used.