Assessing Panamanian hospitals' performance with alternative frontier methods

Abstract In the last decades, there has been a growing interest in measuring efficiency of hospitals using different methodological approaches, mainly represented by data envelopment analysis (DEA) and stochastic frontier (SFA). this study, we estimate measures performance for sample Panamanian public over an 11‐year period (2005–2015) both traditional methods (DEA SFA) compare them with efficiencies estimated alternative approach, so‐called StoNED (stochastic semi‐nonparametric data), which combines virtues those unified framework. One most interesting features health system Panama is that it segmented, as are operating under two parallel management schemes (the Ministry Health Social Security Fund), thus our empirical will also focus on exploring differences between each regime. Our results show certain divergences scores methodologies, but all possible to detect experienced clear decrease their levels throughout evaluated, being much higher belonging Fund.