Health Care Benchmarking and Performance Evaluation

This new edition continues to emphasize the use of data envelopment analysis (DEA) to create optimization-based benchmarks within hospitals, physician group practices, health maintenance organizations, nursing homes and other health care delivery organizations. Suitable for graduate students learning DEA applications in health care as well as for practicing administrators, it is divided into two sections covering methods and applications.

Section I considers efficiency evaluations using DEA; returns to scale; weight restricted (multiplier) models; non-oriented or slack-based models, including in this edition two versions of non-controllable variable models and categorical variable models; longitudinal (panel) evaluations and the effectiveness dimension of performance evaluation. A new chapter then looks at new and advanced models of DEA, including super-efficiency, congestion DEA, network DEA, and dynamic network models. Mathematical formulations of various DEA models are placed in end-of-chapter appendices.

Section II then looks at health care applications within particular settings, chapter-by-chapter, including hospitals, physician practices, nursing homes and health maintenance organizations (HMOs). Other chapters then explore home health care and home health agencies; dialysis centers, community mental health centers, community-based your services, organ procurement organizations, aging agencies and dental providers; DEA models to evaluate provider performance for specific treatments, including stroke, mechanical ventilation and perioperative services. A new chapter then examines international-country-based applications of DEA in health care in 16 different countries, along with OECD and multi-country studies. Most of the existing chapters in this section were expanded with recent applications.

Included with the book is online access to a learning version of DEA Solver software, written by Professor Kaoru Tone, which can solve up to 50 DMUsfor various DEA models listed in the User’s Guide at the end of the book.

“This book presents a valuable collection of DEA models, with associated mathematical optimization models applied to different areas of health care. The author, a leading expert in the area of heath care, intends this book for students of quantitative methods for health care, concerned with the methods of DEA for performance analysis and decision making. ... this book contains a survey of many useful topics and issues relevant for academics, students and practitioners. Therefore, this is a very interesting and useful book and it is one of the best books in the area of quantitative methods for health care.” (Dr. Sardar M. N. Islam  Ph. D., LL. B., Professor of Business, Economics and Finance, Victoria University, Australia)

Dr. Ozcan is a professor of Health Administration at Virginia Commonwealth University and the Editor-in-Chief of the journal, Health Care Management Science. He has written a book that will have wide use in the academic and practitioner health care communities. It is a book that will be particularly influential in the application and utility of performance measures in the health care systems worldwide.