Care Appropriateness and Health Productivity Evolution: A Non-Parametric Analysis of the Italian Regional Health Systems.

Background: There has been increasing interest in measuring the productive performance of healthcare services since the mid-1980s.

Objective: By applying bootstrapped data envelopment analysis across the 20 Italian Regional Health Systems (RHSs) for the period 2008-2012, we employed a two-stage procedure to investigate the relationship between care appropriateness and productivity evolution in public hospital services.

Methods: In the first stage, we estimated the Malmquist index and decomposed this overall measure of productivity into efficiency and technological change.

Renovating Charity Hospital or building a new hospital in post-Katrina New Orleans: economic rationale versus political will.

Since September 2005, Charity Hospital of New Orleans has been closed due to Hurricane Katrina. A debate following the closing arose about whether this public hospital should be renovated or a new medical center affiliated with the Louisiana State University should be built. Using academic literature, government statistics, and popular press reports, we describe the economic implications that support the view that Charity Hospital should have been renovated.

Social efficiency of hospital care delivery: frontier analysis from the consumer's perspective.

The efficiency of hospital services and patients' access to hospitals are both important health care policy issues. In the past, research has relied on studying these topics separately. In this article, we measure both efficiency and access at the same time using data envelopment analysis (DEA).