Evaluating technical efficiency and the effect of innovative healthcare delivery on Italian hospitals: A two stage DEA approach
The last few years have shown a growing trend in healthcare efficiency measurement. Very often this topic deals on production and not on the innovative aspects because of measurement difficulties. The goal of this work is to develop a model for evaluating the technical efficiency by considering different organizational and management aspects and to understand whether the presence of differences on management, information technology, financial and innovation on healthcare delivery can affect the efficiency level. The model was built starting from a literature review and on empirical experiences. The results of a survey show the implementation status of the guidelines of the Italian "Patto per la Salute 2014 2016" to verify if some of the levers proposed by the survey can positively influence the efficiency. The analysis performed have been carried out in two stages. In the first stage, healthcare efficiency is measured via bootstrapped Data Envelopment Analysis. In the second stage, the impacts of organizational and environmental variables on efficiency are investigated. Results show an increase of the efficiency gap between the best practice and small hospital due to economies of scale and low reachability.