Levels and Determinants of Hospital Inefficiency

摘要

Whether hospitals are now less inefficient than they once were is an important public policy question. The study applies two relatively new methods to quantify inefficiency levels in the hospital industry and then compares the results yielded by each method. These new techniques, data envelopment analysis and frontier regression, permit inefficiencies to be conceptualized as deviations from best practice input/output relationships, rather than the average of such relationships. A longitudinal data set on service production and costs in 186 acute care Florida hospitals in continuous operation over the period 1982-1993 is assembled to carry out the analysis. The empirical work estimates levels and temporal changes in inefficiency. These results are then examined in some detail in order to assess the degree to which the two models produce covergent or divergent evidence about hospital efficiency. Multivariate statistical analyses of the main correlates or determinants of measured efficiency are conducted.