Utilización del Value Efficiency Analysis (VEA) en la medición de la eficiencia en al atención primaria

Laburpena

Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) has been extensively employed in evaluating the productivity of health services due to its enormous flexibility and the conservative character of its results. However, the empirical application of DEA frequently faces important problems. A well known drawback of DEA is its low discriminating power when the number of dimensions is large but the sample at hand is not. This paper explores the possibility to improve the discriminating power of DEA using a refinement known as Value Efficiency Analysis (VEA). VEA incorporates some qualitative information in order to identify a decision making unit that may be considered as a good referent globally. The application of this techni- que to a sample of 61 primary health centers in Asturias shows a strong improvement in the discriminating power, obtaining a reduction of 32% in the number of centers that are considered efficient. The results also evidence a scale problem in some of the biggest health centers. We find a notable relationship between productive efficiency and the percentage of aged population that is assigned to the health center. In contrast, there is no significant relationship between efficiency and teaching (MIR) or geographical dispersion.