Managing nursing home quality using DEA with weight restrictions

An area of increasing importance has been the use of quality measures in the study of health care. One specific application involves the performance of nursing homes. Previous studies using data envelopment analysis (DEA) methodology to study this problem have revealed several problems, including the selection of quality output measures and the assignment of weights to these measures that result in minimizing their impact. In this chapter, we will use weight restrictions as an effective means of including important quality measures in the DEA model and allowing the DEA results to discriminate among high- and low-quality performing nursing homes.