The integration of Data Envelopment Analysis and Service Structure
Design for Improving the Efficiency of Healthcare Data Envelopment
Analysis and Service Structure Design for Healthcare Efficiency
Abstract
Measuring the efficiency of health services using Data Envelopment
Analysis is a customary practice nowadays. In addition, some of the
studies use analytical techniques to discover the variables that explain
the efficiency level of such services. Nevertheless, efficiency analyses
have seldom resulted in proposals to design organizational health care
structures that provide adequate management for improving efficiency.
Thus, to address the lack of use of Data Envelopment Analysis results in
practice, this paper provides a general methodology based on the idea
that measuring the efficiency of healthcare services must be
complemented with their redesign to obtain potential efficiency
improvements. This redesign includes healthcare processes or clinical
flows, analytical techniques to advise such processes -e.g., OR/MS and
AI models-, information technology for their support, and new management
structures to facilitate the implementation and operation of the
redesigns. Such methodology was applied to a large hospital specialized
in cancer to illustrate its use and the results that can be achieved.
They show that the potential cost savings of the proposed design are
about US$ 1.0 million yearly. To generate such savings, the author
designed new medical and management practices with the hospital
personnel participation. The implementation of the practices and their
continuous evaluation and innovation was possible by the new
organizational structure designed for such purpose. This work shows the
importance of integration methodologies to generate better-founded
designs and facilitate their implementation. This integration is lacking
in health-service design research, particularly in connection with
architecture, processes, and organizational structure; this paper shows
that this is a promising line of application. Highlights DEA
analysis determines efficiency of health services and ways to improve it
Scarce research on how to use DEA results to improve health processes
exists A DEA-based methodology to design health and supporting flows is
presented The methodology is applied to the design of the flows of a
cancer hospital