Download This PaperOptimistic and Pessimistic Benchmarking Approaches for Assessing the Performance of Healthcare Entities in Pandemic Times: The Case of Portuguese Public Hospitals Before, During, and After COVID-19 Outbreak
48 Pages Posted: 20 Apr 2023
Date Written: March 27, 2023
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic had a significant impact on every economic sector, including healthcare, which experienced unprecedent demand despite the existence of limited resources, such as hospital beds, medical supplies, staffing resources, funding, among others. The magnitude and global scale of this impact serve as a significant incentive to thoroughly analyse its effects and their evolution throughout this period. This study aims to identify strengths and weaknesses of the healthcare entities, improve preparedness for future crises, enhance accountability and transparency, and drive policy decisions. This research employed a Benefit-of-the-Doubt (BoD) approach, constructing composite indicators to assess the impact of the pandemic on the Portuguese public hospitals. The methodology employs an optimistic and a pessimistic model, with benevolent as well as heavily penalizing weight constraints. Findings suggest that the pandemic aggravated the differences between the hospitals examined. Specifically, the top performers distanced themselves further from other entities after the first wave of the pandemic, as their recovery was quicker and subsequent waves were less impactful. After the recovery, these top entities achieved higher scores than before, which suggests that the pandemic may have taught valuable lessons with positive implications.
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Funding Information: This work is part of the research activity carried out at Civil Engineering Research and Innovation for Sustainability (CERIS) and has been funded by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) in the framework of project UIDB/04625/2020.
Conflict of Interests: The authors declare that they have no competing interests.
Keywords: Healthcare Performance, Data Envelopment Analysis, COVID-19 Pandemic, Composite Indicators, Hospital efficiency, Benefit of the Doubt
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