Abstract

We study in this paper the performance of Hospitals in Lebanon. Using the nonparametric method Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), we are able to measures relative efficiency of Hospitals in Lebanon. DEA is a technique that uses linear programming and it measures the relative efficiency of similar type of organizations termed as Decision Making Units (DMUs). In this study, due to the lack of individual data on hospital level, each DMU refers to a qada in Lebanon where the used data represent the aggregation of input and outputs of different hospitals within the qada. In DEA, the inclusion of more number of inputs and /or outputs results in getting a more number of efficient units. Therefore, selecting the appropriate inputs and outputs is a major factor of DEA results. Therefore, we use here the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) in order to reduce the data structure into certain principal components which are essential for identifying efficient DMUs. It is important to note that we have used the basic BCC-input model for the entire analysis. We considered 24 DMUs for the study, using DEA on original data; we got 17 DMUs out of 24 DMUs as efficient. Then we considered 1 PC for inputs and 1 PC for output with almost 80 percent variances, resulting in 3 DMUs as efficient and 21 as inefficient. Using 1 PC for input and 2 PCs for output with 90 percent variance for both input and output, we got 9 DMUs as efficient and 15 DMUs as inefficient. Finally, we have attempted to identify the efficient units with 2 PCs and for 2 PCs for input and outputs with variance more than 95 percent, resulting in 10 efficient DMUs and 14 inefficient DMUs. In Principal Component analysis, if the variance lies between 80 percent to-90 percent it is judged as a meaningful one. It is concluded that Principal Component Analysis plays an important role in the reduction of input output variables and helps in identifying the efficient DMUs and improves the discriminating power of DEA.

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