Measuring and evaluating efficiency of hospitals through total quality management: A multi-criteria data envelopment analysis model

The purpose of this study is to measure and evaluate the efficiency of 12 hospitals in Turkey using a multi-criteria Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) methodology. Number of beds, number of physicians and the critical factors of total quality management in the health care sector were used as inputs of the model. The outputs used in this analysis incorporated financial and non-financial performance of hospitals, number of outpatients and number of patient days. Performance of the hospitals was measured using subjective measures based on executive's perception of how their organization performed relative to the competition. Results provide management with information regarding the relatively best practice hospitals in the observation sets and locate the relatively inefficient hospitals by comparison with the best practice ones. At last some suggestions are made for the least efficient hospital. © 2007 by The Haworth Press. All rights reserved