Service performance in public healthcare system: data envelopment analysis

As well as companies that compete in market, in public health system organizations compete to satisfy customer’s need, and therefore identifying those needs and delivering the value is critical in success. Return to Scale and Damage to Scale are measures. In this study data envelopment analysis is developed to measure the Return to Scale and Damage to Scale in public health organization. Two new assumptions for production possibility set are proposed as Weak Natural Disposability and weak managerial disposability. Then three types of models including efficiency evaluation, Return to Scale determination, and Damage to Scale determination are proposed based on radial and non-radial models. A case study is handled using real data of 33 hospitals in Tehran. Each hospital is assumed as a decisionmaking unit with 4 inputs, 2 desirable outputs, and 2 undesirable outputs. The proposed approaches are straightforward and applicable for real world problems