Efficiency Analysis in Health Care by Multivariate Classification Methods

Abstract

Due to the rapidly rising costs and to limited financial resources, in recent years, the European health institutions were increasingly encouraged to implement rational tools in order to better manage available resources and to make efficient choices in order to have the best cost-benefit ratio. Due to the strategic role of the Health Care sector is very important in an economic system, the fulfilment of the European standards government requires to develop tools able to fastly identify the inefficiency situations. This contribution aims to study and investigate efficiency in health organization using multivariate methods of data mining (by example, segmentation analysis and neural networks). Its practical interest will be directed in particular to the assessment of organizational appropriateness in health care, in order to evaluate the incidence of the “day hospital” and “day surgery” procedures, analysing their relevance in the health system as well as their appropriate level in the Apulian region. One of the results of such analysis is to understand some decisional mechanism of the Health Care management, as well as the structure of inefficiency in the health network.