Hospital efficiency: how to spend less maintaining quality?

Background The recent global economic crisis has negatively affected the availability of budget for health care systems and is pushing governments worldwide to obtain a more explicit and urgent rationing of resources. The purpose of this study is to provide, through Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), a methodological framework useful for investigating technical efficiency of hospital care. To validate such a methodological framework, in this study we compared 50 Italian public hospital trusts (AOs) to identify relative …