Production of health & healthcare - The healthcare production function and hospital efficiency
5 important questions on Production of health & healthcare - The healthcare production function and hospital efficiency
What are the four key questions about healthcare production?
- How to maximize the value of healthcare with the available scarce resources?
- Which factors (inputs) contribute to production of health care (output)?
- What is the marginal contribution of these inputs?
- What’s the optimal combination of these inputs in a given context?
What does the healthcare production function?
Generally:
- Q (quantity produced) = f (L(labour inputs), K(capital inputs))
What is the goal of the healthcare production function?
- Higher grades + faster learning
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- 100% sure, 100% understanding
What is the cost function?
- Cost functions describe the relationship between production costs and output levels at different input prices
- è Short run: TC = f (Q, PL, PK) + Fixed costs
- è Long run: TC = f (Q, PL, PK)
- Average cost (AC) = TC / G (cost per unit of output)
- Least-cost production: output at the minimum of the long run average cost (LRAC) curve
What difficulties are all hospitals faced with cost studies?
- Measuring output
- enormous heterogenity of products
- defining and measuring quality of care
- mearusing input and output prices
- lack of reliable measures
- lack of data on physicians' input prices
The question on the page originate from the summary of the following study material:
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