Performance assessment indicators: How DEA and Pabon Lasso describe Iranian hospitals' performance

Back ground: Assessing the hospitals' performance is considered as a focal point because of their vital role in healthcare systems. This study was conducted to assess the performance of hospitals affiliated with Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran comparing the results of Pabon Lasso model and DEA. Methods: This was a cross- sectional study on 23 Iranian hospitals in 2010. Related data was collected through two special checklists one for indicators of Pabon Lasso and the other for assessing efficiency applying with DEA. The former data was analyzed using Excel and SPSS version 17 and the latter interpreted applying with Windeap software version 2.1. Results: Pabon Lasso graph indicates that there were four hospitals in the first zone that represents for inefficiency and underuse of resources, in contrast, another four hospitals were located in the third part of the graph which stands for efficiency and optimal level of productivity. Results of Deap2 also mentioned that the mean efficiency of these hospitals in 2010 was 0.914 and only 21.7% of them could reach the complete scale efficiency score (SE=1).Furthermore there was no complete accordance between those hospitals occurred in the third zone with those DEA recognized as fully efficient on the other hand, the hospitals considered in the first zone did not fully match to those situated under efficient frontier. Conclusion: As it is not rational to judge the hospitals performance only by attention to their separate indexes, applying multi factorial models is inevitable. At the same time, attention to the results gained from different methods of performance assessment for a more realistic status picture is considered necessary.