Data envelopment analysis under uncertainty: A case study from public healthcare

摘要

Since the last three decades, too many studies have been done in order to analyze the efficiency of health systems in developed countries, while only a few researches have attempted to apply data envelopment analysis (DEA) in the health centers in developing countries especially in Iran. One of the most important issues in healthcare systems is to measure the relative efficiency of similar units based on non-financial factors. Data envelopment analysis has become popular among practitioners who wanted to rank the public health care systems based on different factors such as the service level or the number of employees, etc. However, one of the key drawbacks within implementing DEA is the involved uncertainty. In this paper, a robust methodology is proposed for data envelopment analysis to measure the efficiency of health care systems considering uncertainty on output parameters. An empirical study is presented on a complete set of public health centers located in Ilam province in Islamic Republic of Iran. The study has used real world data and the results have been compared with different stochastic approaches for frontier analysis. The obtained results indicated that the robust DEA approach is relatively a reliable method for efficiency estimating.