title: Hospital efficiency measurement and evaluation. Empirical test of a new technique.
abstract: A new technique for identifying inefficient hospitals, Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), is field tested by application to a group of teaching hospitals. DEA is found to provide meaningful insights into the location and nature of hospital inefficiencies as judged by the opinion of a panel of hospital experts. DEA provides insights about hospital efficiency not available from the widely used efficiency evaluation techniques of ratio analysis and econometric-regression analysis. DEA is, therefore, suggested as a means to help identify and measure hospital inefficiency as a basis for directing management efforts toward increasing efficiency and reducing health care costs.
mesh_terms: D000368:Aged; D003365:Costs and Cost Analysis; D003953:Diagnosis-Related Groups; D004526:Efficiency; D006739:Hospital Administration / Q000592:standards*; D006760:Hospitalization / Q000191:economics; D006784:Hospitals, Teaching / Q000458:organization & administration; D006801:Humans; D008404:Massachusetts; D008433:Mathematics; D008722:Methods; D008875:Middle Aged; D012044:Regression Analysis