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The Use of Data Envelopment Analysis with Probabilistic Assurance Regions for Measuring Hospital Efficiency

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Abstract

This paper uses Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) for an estimation of the cost efficiency of 70 Danish hospitals. The analysis relates to a cost function based on 483 outputs in combination with a set of probabilistic assurance regions defined by the cost distributions for each output. It is demonstrated that the probabilistic assurance region approach allows for (i) a frontier estimation in the full output space, i.e., no fixed aggregation is required, and (ii) a controlling of the variation in heterogeneity of the output clusters, in casu Diagnosis Related Groups. The likelihood of the estimated efficiency score for a given hospital can be measured based on the sensitivity of the score w.r.t. the probability levels used in the specification of confidence intervals for the probabilistic assurance regions.

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Olesen, O.B., Petersen, N.C. The Use of Data Envelopment Analysis with Probabilistic Assurance Regions for Measuring Hospital Efficiency. Journal of Productivity Analysis 17, 83–109 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1013536404737

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