Evaluating the Impact of Hospital Information Systems on the Technical Efficiency of 8 Central African Hospitals Using Data Envelopment Analysis
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.12856/JHIA-2013-v1-i1-68Abstract
Objectives: this study evaluates the usability of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) for analyzing the technical efficiency before and after hospital information system (HIS) implementation for a set of 8 Central African hospitals (6 Rwandan, 2 Burundian; 6 public and 2 private).
Methods: DEA is a method that uses linear programming techniques to produce a relative efficiency score for organizational units where the presence of multiple inputs and outputs makes straightforward comparisons difficult. DEA is non-parametric, requiring no assumptions about the (most often unknown) functional relationship between inputs and outputs (in contrast to regression based models). The method directly compares health facilities against a combination of peers. In this study post-HIS implementation health facility productivity was also compared against results obtained before HIS implementation.
Results: the average technical efficiency increase of 5,04% after HIS implementation appeared not to be statistically significant in our small dataset.
Conclusions: despite the lack of statistical significance, the results still suggest that DEA may offer interesting opportunities for measuring productivity impact of large scale implementations of health information management methods and systems using data sets from heterogeneous collections of health facilities. Further research on an extended set of sub-Saharan health facilities has been programmed for that purpose.
Keywords: Data Envelopment Analysis, Sub-Saharan Africa,Technical efficiency, Hospital Information SystemsDownloads
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