Factors affecting primary health care centers’ economic and production efficiency

Panagiotis Mitropoulos (), Kostantinos Kounetas () and Ioannis Mitropoulos
Additional contact information
Panagiotis Mitropoulos: Technological Educational Institute of Western Greece
Ioannis Mitropoulos: Technological Educational Institute of Western Greece

Annals of Operations Research, 2016, vol. 247, issue 2, No 20, 807-822

Abstract: Abstract Little is known about the efficiency of health centers, despite their central role in primary health care strategy for several countries. This study evaluates the health centers in Greece, and identifies factors impeding the achievement of efficiency, with the aim of determining how their efficiency could be improved. Two alternative conceptual models are used to ensure the consistency of the efficiency results: one model is focusing on production efficiency and the other on economic efficiency. Subsequently a second stage analysis is performed to account for the impact of explanatory variables on efficiency. The use of DEA models alongside with bootstrap techniques allows calculating more accurately the efficiency scores that can reflect the performance of health centers more properly. The main drivers of health centers’ technical efficiency for both conceptual models were the location characteristics, the population growth, the mortality rate and the competition. The scale efficiency of health centers in production model is reflected by the size of their respective covered populations, the location characteristics and the mortality rate while the economic model is affected by their size, the location characteristics and the percentage of population working in agriculture. Determining how these variables influence on efficiency is essential for determining performance improvement strategies.

Keywords: Bootstrapped DEA; Truncated regression analysis; Primary healthcare (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10479-015-2056-5 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:annopr:v:247:y:2016:i:2:d:10.1007_s10479-015-2056-5

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/journal/10479

DOI: 10.1007/s10479-015-2056-5

Access Statistics for this article

Annals of Operations Research is currently edited by Endre Boros

More articles in Annals of Operations Research from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().