The stochastic frontier analysis technique in measuring the technical and economic efficiency of hospital diagnostic laboratories: a case study in Iran

Cost Effectiveness and Resource Allocation

Research

Hasan Yusefzadeh¹  Mina Alinejhad¹  Behrouz Fathi¹  Siamak Aghlmand¹  Sadegh Feizollahzadeh² 

[1] Department of Health Economics and Management, School of Public Health, Urmia University of Medical Sciences, Urmia, Iran;Department of Medical Laboratory Sciences, School of Allied Medical Sciences, Solid Tumor Research Center, Cellular and Molecular Medicine research Institute, Urmia University of Medical Sciences, Urmia, Iran;

关键词: Hospital;    Diagnostic laboratory;    Stochastic frontier analysis;    Economic efficiency;   

DOI  :  10.1186/s12962-022-00406-8

 received in 2022-07-04, accepted in 2022-12-05,  发布年份 2022

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

An inefficient health system wastes scarce resources even if it makes considerable gains in accountability and equity. Such a system is expected to perform better. Therefore, it is vital to examine the current performance of health systems and their constituents and assess how to reach their maximum potential. This study aimed to evaluate the technical and economic efficiency of medical diagnostic laboratories in hospitals affiliated with Urmia University of Medical Sciences (UUMS) in 2016. In this descriptive-analytical study, data from diagnostic laboratories of the hospitals of UUMS have been inputted into Frontier4.1 software after taking the log of variables. Then, the technical and economic efficiency of the laboratories were obtained by estimating the production and cost function using the stochastic frontier analysis method, assuming input minimization for 2016. The mean technical and economic efficiency score of the diagnostic laboratories were determined to be 93.1% and 51.9%, respectively. These laboratories need to reduce their inputs and costs in order to achieve full efficiency without changing the amount of their output. Although the average economic efficiency of the diagnostic laboratories of the studied hospitals was high, there is still an increase in the efficiency of these units, given the cost of inputs at the time of allocating resources. In addition, it is possible to improve the technical efficiency of the clinical laboratories of hospitals affiliated with UUMS by 48.1% by applying the same level of inputs and without increasing the costs.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© The Author(s) 2022