Performance Measurement in the Health sector: Uses of Frontier Efficiency Methodologies and Multi-Criteria Decision Making

Excerpt

Performance measurement is essential for improvement. Although techniques for collecting, analyzing, and reporting data fall within the quantitative skill set of the organization, translating data into information that managers need to promote performance improvement requires a different and more subtle skill set. Health services sector is a complex area that is unique in all its characteristics. It has too many dimensions to be fitted into a simple singular unit and it is therefore essentially very difficult to approach the measurement of the performance of healthcare services by using one method or another [7]. Frontier Efficiency Methodologies and Multi-criteria Decision Making have been used rigorously in recent years. Data Envelopment analysis [1‐3] is proven to be a useful tool in measuring efficiency and productivity of hospitals and health care related units [4, 5]. Multi-criteria decision making approach has also been adopted extensively for performance analysis in healthcare sector [6, 8‐10]. …