Going beyond health efficiency: What really matters?

Abstract

Both citizens and policymakers demand the best possible results from a country's healthcare system. It is of utmost importance to accurately and objectively assess the efficiency of a healthcare system and to note the key indicators, where resources are lost, and possibilities for improvement. This paper evaluates the efficiency of health systems in 38 countries, mainly members of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, using data envelopment analysis (DEA). In the first stage, bootstrapped Ivanovic distance is used to generate weights for the indicators, thus taking into consideration different country's goals, but not to the extent of reducing the possibility of comparison. The analysis shows that human resources are the most important health system resource and countries should pay special attention to developing and employing competent medical workers. The reorganization of human resources and the funds allocated to them could also increase efficiency. The second stage examines environmental indicators to find the causes of inefficiency. No proof is found that any one basic health system funding model produces better health outcomes than the others. Obesity is identified as a major issue. K E Y W O R D Sefficiency evaluation, data envelopment analysis, health systems,

Design considerations for patient‐centered eHealth interventions in an underserved context: A case of health and wellbeing services within Nairobi's informal settlements in Kenya

“…According to Radojicic et al (2020), a good health system should deliver quality services to all people whenever and wherever they need them despite the variations in the nature of the services provided across different health care settings. According to the authors, a good health system requires adequate health care infrastructure, that is, a strong financing mechanism; skilled and well remunerated workforce; reliable information to support evidence‐based policy decisions and logistics for commodity supplies.…”

“…According to the authors, a good health system requires adequate health care infrastructure, that is, a strong financing mechanism; skilled and well remunerated workforce; reliable information to support evidence‐based policy decisions and logistics for commodity supplies. Subsequently, in order to guarantee the delivery of quality health care to the public, there must be equitable and efficient distribution of resources (Radojicic et al, 2020) including implementation of eHealth interventions. In the context of typical IS, the aspects of quality, cost, and efficiency should be prioritized towards the delivery of holistic quality health care hence they must be addressed simultaneously (Lee et al, 2006).…”

“…The adoption and advancement of technology by governments has induced great transformation across the globe in terms of the quality of public service delivery (Ramli, 2017) including in health care. This is due to the recognition of health as a key pillar in socio‐economic development hence the need to ensure improved health and wellbeing for all populations with reduced health inequities and inequalities (Clark & Wu, 2016; Radojicic et al, 2020). According to WHO, the ultimate goal in modern health care is to have a continuum of care for patients with an integrated, people‐centered approach to respond to emerging health challenges more appropriately including the use of ICT (WHO, 2016).…”

Advancing universal health coverage in the COVID-19 era: an assessment of public health services technical efficiency and applied cost allocation in Cambodia

“…A fundamental assumption behind this method is that if a given producer is capable of producing X units of output with Y inputs, then other producers should also be able to do the same if they were to operate efficiently [36]. DEA is an established performance measurement method and has been used to evaluate the technical efficiency of health systems ( [8,[37][38][39][40][41][42]. The approach can use the radial projection to the efficiency frontier to calculate target outputs levels for each inefficient DMU [43][44][45].…”

Health Expenditure, Institutions, and Economic Growth: Insights From Selected MENA Countries

“…Though the healthcare system is one of the chief indicators of a country's development (Radojicic et al 2020), the importance of health capital has only just caught the interest of researchers (Akingba et al 2018;Silva et al 2018). Despite its importance, the role of institutional quality in the relationship between economic growth and health expenditure is understudied (Sethi et al, 2020).…”