DEA Based Algorithm for EU Healthcare Efficiency Evaluation

The problem of efficiency evaluation in healthcare is recently dealt from many perspectives, such as analysis of investment and cost containment, development of country ranking models or designing new indicators for characterizing healthcare status. The article explores the healthcare efficiency in EU countries by applying a DEA (Data Envelopment Analysis) method. The modification of DEA gives several advantages of the proposed model, as it not only computes healthcare efficiency of a country, but it enables to give quantitative characteristics of particular deficiencies which explain differences of efficiency levels; it also. The research results highlight different levels of efficiency of EU healthcare systems determined by hierarchical selection and grouping health-related input characteristics and by comparing them to the financial value of investment. The experimental analysis revealed that DEA-based model allows estimating the limits of increasing efficiency of country healthcare within same expenditure levels.