Primary care : Method
The technique used to carry out the assessment of the productive efficiency of the health centers is shown data envelopment analysis (EDA). This method is included within the boundary models for evaluating the efficiency, models that determine the efficiency (relative) of each entity in relation to the production frontier (or production costs, as appropriate) to delineate the more efficient.
While the estimate of the border can be made from other approaches metodológicos3, the characteristics of the Primary Health Care as the multidimensional nature of its production, the absence of reliable prices, the hierarchical organization of health professionals in schools and the difficulty
to model the production process dictate the use of flexible techniques able to respect the particularities of each production. From this perspective, the EDA is presented as the method of measuring efficiency greater acceptance and implementation has been in the public sphere in general and in Primary Care in particular4.
It is a method, based on theoretical work of Farrell and 19,575 by solving a maximization problem, is able to transform a situation in which various productive resources generate multiple products in a single index of efficiency. This index is identified with the value that maximizes the ratio of the weighted sum of outputs and inputs of the weighted sum of the entity analizada6:
where: H0: efficiency index of the rated entity; yr0: quantity of output r produced by the rated entity; xi0: amount of input i consumed by the rated entity; ur: weight assigned to output r vi: weight assigned to input i, j: number of units to be analyzed; s: number of outputs that are produced, and m: number of inputs that are used.
In addition to determining the set of weights that maximizes the efficiency index of the entity at issue, the resolution for each of the units under study, a mathematical programming problem similar to the former can separate the centers of efficient or inefficient, quantify the inefficiency of the latter, identifying the causes of which are inefficient and how to correct the inefficiency.
However, for operational and interpretative virtues of AED before Apresentadas can be of practical use, it is necessary for its application to a productive reality meets a specific set of requirements that support the scope and validity of the results. These requirements affect both the selection of the sample and model specification