Efficiency in Health Care Systems

Its without doubt that there are countless ways to define efficiency in the health care system. The different structures of the health care systems around the world give rise to discrepancies in the definitions present. Yet such definitions all share common elements. Hence a unanimous statement of what efficiency is should be adopted to allow the fair evaluation of health care systems internationally. Efficiency should be simply defined as the balanced relationship between the inputs to health care and the maximized outputs that are generated from such inputs. Efficiency can be split into three broad categories, operational efficiency, allocative efficiency and administrative efficiency (Elizabeth A. McGlynn, et al. 2008). With this definition, it is necessary to outline what constitutes towards input and what constitutes towards output, namely public and private funding and their timely and appropriate use towards building well equipped hospital environments, exploiting recent advances in technology and training high quality staff. Here output refers to the well-being of patients; output refers to the increase in benefits that patients receive as a result of inputs. Such results can be partly quantified by a country’s life expectancy at birth, rate of adult and infant mortality and disease prevalence.
There are a plethora of common definitions for efficiency but they can be discounted for being too specific, hence losing their ability to be applicable to all situations. An example of such a definition states that efficiency can be defined as “Avoiding waste, including waste of equipment supplies, ideas and energy” (Institute of Medicine 2001). This is a clear and precise interpretation, but waste is not the only factor contributing towards a lack of efficiency. The ill use of resources, leading to the investment of time and money into inappropriate ventures that are not in demand at the time, such as investment in technology when the training of physicians is