Hospital performance evaluation under uncertainty using neutrosophic DEA: A comparison of CRS and VRS models for healthcare development
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.55573/JISED.118770Keywords:
Data envelopment analysis, Neutrosophic sets, Constant returns to scale, Variable returns to scale, Scale efficiency, Hospital efficiencyAbstract
In practice, finding public hospitals that are "on the frontier" continues to be a challenge for health authorities, and two issues are recurrent when measuring how efficiently hospitals spent the use of the budget: first, standard data envelopment analysis (DEA) is often not able to distinguish between "on the frontier" and "behind the frontier" hospitals; second, budget records are often incomplete and/or indeterminate. In this study, 32 hospitals in the public health sector in Tunisia are evaluated by neutrosophic DEA under both constant and variable returns to scale, and the neutrosophic CCR model (NCCR) and the neutrosophic BCC model (NBCC) are compared. The operating budgets are triangular neutrosophic numbers and are transformed into crisp ones based on a ranking function. After we account for scale differences the mean efficiency went from 0.676 to 0.763 under constant and variable returns respectively. By comparing the two perspectives with a scale-efficiency measure, the shortcomings of the two can be distinguished and health authorities can focus on two aspects: either managerial improvement or investing in capacity.
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