Chapter 13 Efficiency in Hospital Industry: Summary and Conclusions

It is well recognized that hospitals do not operate in a competitive market typically observed in the economics literature, but rather alternative measures of performance must be developed. In other words, health policy analysts, managers, and decision-makers cannot rely on determining efficiency via the typical profit maximizing/cost minimizing firm but develop techniques that address the issues germane to hospital productivity. What has been presented in this book demonstrates the research in both productivity and policy that must attend to this anomaly. In this introductory section, we briefly summarize the theoretical underpinnings of this book.