Abstract:
Ever since the 1970s, the behavior of health care providers has been a research
topic of serious concern to medical and economic scholars in the advanced countries.
Because of the increased supply and demand for medical care, related expenditure
has risen so rapidly that it has exceeded the economic growth rate and has increased
to such an extent that it has affected the opportunities for the balanced development
of other sectors. For this reason, in the medical market, how to make good use
of limited medical resources, in order to seek the largest health standard for
all of the country’s citizens, is currently one of the most important research
directions in medical economics. In terms of the supply of medical care in the
market, hospitals are in the most important position and also account for the
most expenditure, that is, hospitals use the most medical resources in the medical
market. According to Bureau of National Health Insurance statistics, hospitals
have since 1995 when national health insurance began to be implemented on average
accounted for 65% of total reported medical expenses. If such expenses are categorized
according to the level of evaluation, medical expenses reported by medical centers
and regional hospitals account for 70% of total reported expenditure in the
hospital sector and physicians mostly control some 80% of this medical expenditure.
For this reason, physicians have a major influence on medical expenditure in
terms of how efficiently medical resources are used. Moreover, when seeking
to measure the concept of relative efficiency in regard to medical care, most
studies focus on an evaluation of the relative efficiency of hospitals. It is
for this reason that this study intends to focus on the physicians and to examine
the input-output relationships between the medical resources used by these physicians
and the quantity of medical services provided by them, in order to analyze the
productivity and efficiency of physicians. In addition, by applying the Malmquist
productivity index, this study empirically evaluates how the quantities of each
physician′s medical inputs and service outputs affect productivity and
efficiency and uses panel data to analyze the sources of each physician’s
productivity and efficiency changes over the years.
Chun-Chu Liu , 2006. Measuring the Productivity of Physicians and Evaluating the Factors that Influence such Productivity in Taiwan. Journal of Medical Sciences, 6: 577-584.
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