Application of DEA for Performance Evaluation of Asian Countries HealthCare System

Introduction: The performance evaluation of healthcare system in macro-level is important. This paper evaluates performance of health service of Asian countries in 2006. Methods: In the first step, the initial data for performance evaluation has been collected from the site world health organization (WHO) and are weighted by Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) and finally they were reduced to a desirable output, an undesirable output, a controllable input, a fix input, a social and an economic indicator. Applying eigenvector procedure in AHP needs the use of maple software to calculate the weight of each component in each group. Then, the technical efficiencies of healthcare system of countries are measure by standard input oriented DEA linear programming model. Writing the linear programming model in GAMS (General Algebraic Modeling System) does the execution of DEA models: that we enter the value of introduced indicators in first step for each country. Results: For fair evaluation of healthcare systems of countries in competitive space produced by DEA, environmental factors is effective so in the next step the influence of socio-economic indicators is shown on evaluated technical efficiency in the previous step. The effect of environmental factors is done by composition of two DEA model suggested by Banker & Morey in 1986 and Kao & Liu in 2000. Finally, we will present the results of efficiency of countries in the tables and the manner of being efficient for country with non-efficient healthcare system by suggesting as lower the expenditure on healthcare system. Conclusion: The healthcare system of each country is ranked according to the efficient usage of resources to deliver the health service and the reducing the expenditure results to excess the efficiency. Keywords: Performance; Performance Assessment; Data; Models, Statistical; Health.