Potential efficiency gains and expenditure savings in the Italian Regional Healthcare Systems

Dino Rizzi and Michele Zanette ()
Additional contact information
Michele Zanette: Department of Economics, Ca' Foscari University of Venice

No 2021:27, Working Papers from Department of Economics, University of Venice "Ca' Foscari"

Abstract: The paper aims to analyse the extent to which the adoption of best practice policies could improve the efficiency of Italian Regional Healthcare Systems (RHSs) and reduce public healthcare expenditures. By means of a stochastic frontier model we estimate the RHSs' technical inefficiency and its determinants using a panel data of 16 regions over the period 2010-2016. We use the Essential Levels of Care (LEA) scores computed by the Ministry of Health as a proxy for the RHSs' output and public healthcare expenditure as the main input. The level of inefficiency is a function of a set of variables summarising the organisational arrangements implemented by RHS policymakers. The results allow us to identify the best-practice policy, defined as the set of observable organisational arrangements that maximises aggregate efficiency. Adoption of the best-practice policy by all RHSs leads to potential efficiency gains of 1.5 per cent on average (from 93.4 per cent to 94.9 per cent) and to potential healthcare expenditure savings of 1.8 billion euro in 2016 (1.77 per cent of current expenditures).

Keywords: Healthcare expenditure; regional healthcare systems; efficiency; LEA scores (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H51 H75 I18 R50 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 22 pages
Date: 2021
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cse, nep-eff, nep-eur and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.unive.it/pag/fileadmin/user_upload/dipa ... zi_zanette_27_21.pdf First version, anno (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Potential efficiency gains and expenditure savings in the Italian Regional Healthcare Systems (2021)
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:ven:wpaper:2021:27

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Department of Economics, University of Venice "Ca' Foscari" Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Geraldine Ludbrook ().