Efficiency and the quality of management and care: evidence from Japanese public hospitals

ABSTRACT

We study how the quality of hospital management and medical care both affect efficiency in Japanese local public hospitals. The efficiency is estimated by a stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) and is regressed against the quality scores in hospital accreditation by the Japan Council for Quality Health Care (JCQHC). We find that rule-based hospital management relates to high efficiency, while the suitable management of beds and supplies relates to low efficiency.

KEYWORDS:

• Stochastic frontier analysis
• Japanese public hospitals
• quality of care
• management quality

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• D24
• I12
• L32

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the referee for the constructive comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ For more information about SFA, see Kumbhakar and Lovell (2000). Jacobs et al. (2006) provide a comprehensive overview of efficiency analysis in health care.

² The number in parentheses refers to the item number in the JCQHC evaluation standard version 5.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by a grant-in-aid from Zengin Foundation for Studies on Economics and Finance and JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number JP16K21252.