Healthcare efficiency and the best practices of health systems across the world during COVID-19 pandemic

ABSTRACT

The viral pandemic has placed an extraordinary and sustained demand on complex health systems. Its complexity is increased by the fact that the health systems cannot be instantly enhanced by simply increasing input. Therefore, this paper aims to evaluate the efficiency of health systems across the world to identify relatively efficient countries and the best practices instrumental in achieving this efficiency. The Study resorts to data envelopment analysis (DEA) for measuring efficiency. Given the assumptions of DEA and undesirable output, the study groups the countries into four clusters based on the percentage of infected people.

Further, four models were developed in each group to evaluate the efficiency of health systems. The study found sixteen relatively efficient countries (five from Asia, two from Europe, five from Africa, two from North America, and two from South America). Besides, the study has highlighted certain exciting practices of the relatively efficient countries.

KEYWORDS:

• Healthcare efficiency
• best practices
• leadership styles
• data envelopment analysis
• COVID-19
• resource management

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

K. R. Sinimole

K. R. Sinimole holds a Ph.D. Degree from Tata Institute of Social Sciences. She is an associate professor (Business Analytics) at Rajagiri Business School, Rajagiri College of Social Sciences, Kochi, Kerala. Her teaching and research interests lie in the areas of Business Analytics, Organizational Performance, Effectiveness and Evaluation.