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Do Geographical Locations Affect in Hospitals Performance? A Multi-group Data Envelopment Analysis

Journal of Medical Systems volume 39, Article number: 85 (2015) Cite this article

Abstract

Hospitals are the main and the last component of the health care systems. Therefore, evaluating the performance of hospitals is vital. Several studies are done in hospitals evaluation, but almost none of them consider the geographical features. This paper proposes a new approach for evaluating hospitals. In the proposed approach, hospitals are classified into various groups and each group is equivalent to a province. It causes hospitals in each category (province) must be evaluated in homogenous environment. For this purpose, the conventional data envelopment analysis (DEA) model has been developed to this structure. The main feature of the proposed model is that it takes into consideration the geographical location. In other words, we propose a multi-group DEA model. The data on 288 Iranian hospitals grouped under 31 provinces are used to demonstrate the model. The results show that the efficiency scores are greatly changed when hospitals are evaluated in own groups.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Iranian Ministry of Health and Medical Education for their cooperation in providing the data needed for this academic research.

Conflict of interest

The authors have no conflict of interest about this research.

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Affiliations

  1. Urmia University of Technology, Urmia, West Azerbaijan, Islamic Republic of Iran

    Mustafa Jahangoshai Rezaee & Abuzar Karimdadi

Authors
  1. Mustafa Jahangoshai Rezaee
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  2. Abuzar Karimdadi
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Mustafa Jahangoshai Rezaee.

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This article is part of the Topical Collection on Systems-Level Quality Improvement

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Rezaee, M.J., Karimdadi, A. Do Geographical Locations Affect in Hospitals Performance? A Multi-group Data Envelopment Analysis. J Med Syst 39, 85 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-015-0278-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-015-0278-3

Keywords

  • Multi-group data envelopment analysis
  • Efficiency
  • Geographical location
  • Province
  • Hospital