Performance Assessment in Management: an application to the health care system of the Brazilian Navy

Abstract

Budgetary restrictions have become much more binding for the Brazilian Navy and both users’ access to health services provided by the Navy Health Service as well as hospitals’ access to new technologies appears to be endangered. This paper aims to evaluate the efficiency of naval hospitals in the light of these concerns, with a view toward designing better managerial tools to enhance health services in the Brazilian Navy. The paper presents an application of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to the study of productive efficiency in selected hospital units of the Brazilian Navy in order to suggest improvements on the use of productive resources by the Navy Health Service. Productive efficiency of hospital units located throughout the country are measured and compared. Data Envelopment Analysis models were used to calculate an efficient frontier for the seven naval hospitals assessed and to identify the group of relatively efficient naval hospitals which were used as benchmarks for calculating the pro-efficiency operation plans for the inefficient units.