Title: Efficiency measurement of emergency departments in Isfahan, Iran

Authors: Saeedeh Ketabi; Ehsan Teymouri; Mohammad Ketabi

Addresses: Department of Management, University of Isfahan, Iran ' Department of Management, University of Isfahan, Iran ' Islamic Azad University (Isfahan Branch), Iran

Abstract: The purpose of this study is to evaluate the performance of emergency departments. The multi-criteria comparison between the wards of different hospitals is not only useful for the patients but also important for the hospital's management to improve their performance and for the medical policy makers to plan strategic decisions. In this paper, it is intended to consider the aspects of efficiency beyond the traditional evaluation of check list. The factors which have been chosen are divided into two subsets: first, input factors consisting of no. of active beds, no. of physicians, no. of nurses and medical equipment and second, output factors including no. of discharge, percentage of revival, average waiting time and patient satisfaction. The input oriented and constant returns to scale model of data envelopment analysis (DEA) technique is used to evaluate the efficiency of each emergency department. The model can be used to find out the causes of inefficiency and how to improve the performance. The method has been applied to evaluate and compare 24 EDs of hospitals in Isfahan. DEA model reveals that 37% of them are inefficient. The results may be then used to suggest the improvement strategies based on the input factors.

Keywords: emergency department; performance evaluation; data envelopment analysis; DEA; efficiency; resource utilisation; Iran.

DOI: 10.1504/IJPMB.2018.090794

International Journal of Process Management and Benchmarking, 2018 Vol.8 No.2, pp.142 - 155

Received: 02 Dec 2015
Accepted: 15 Jun 2016
Published online: 28 Mar 2018 *

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