Abstract
The aim of this work is to evaluate the economic efficiency of French intensive care units (ICUs). We develop a two-stage model. In the first step, we use an extended Data Envelopment Analysis model to evaluate the performance of ICUs at the patient level. Few applied works use patient data to gauge efficiency of health care organizations. From a methodological viewpoint, we introduce a directional distance function to gauge performance for each patient in terms of global ICU resources. From an empirical viewpoint, we introduce validated resource utilization indexes (medical and nursing dimensions) and we also control for case-mix heterogeneity with categorical variables including relevant individual measures of illness severity (SAPS II). Data come from a French survey including 15 178 patients of 26 ICUs in the region of Paris over the year 2000. Results show potential savings up to 30% of ICU’s resources and a strong concentration of inefficiency over 20% of patients.
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