Improving the delivery of health care services in the Philippines

• Main Authors: Lavado, Rouselle F., Lagrada, Leizel P., Gozun, Brian C.
• Format: text
• Published: Animo Repository 2010
• Subjects: Medical care—Philippines; Health services administration—Philippines; Medicine and Health
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/faculty_research/7274
• Institution: De La Salle University

The Philippine health care system is comprised of both private and public hospitals, clinics and health care providers and public health units serve a huge majority of the population because of their number and accessibility to more people in terms of price and location. It is therefore important to examine the performance of these public health units and see if they could become more efficient in the delivery of health services. This study will apply DEA to assess the efficiency of provinces in providing health care services in order to assist the Department of Health in identifying the performance level of each province, determining the targets for improvements in securing benefits and using resources, and identifying the peers of provinces in the delivery of health care. The data used in this study are taken from the Field Health Surveillance Information System and Philippine Health Insurance System of Income and Expenditure of the Department of Finance. The following programs were analyzed in this study: maternal health care, child health and environmental sanitation. These programs’ outcomes comprise the percentage of the prevalence of contraceptive use and fully immunized children, for maternal and health care programs; and the percentage of people who have access to potable water and sanitary toilets, for environmental sanitation. As for inputs, expenditure efficiency is analyzed by the health unit budget per capita and technical efficiency included the number of doctors and midwives per 100,000 population and the percentage of rural health units accredited by the Philippine Health Insurance Corporation. The DEA results for efficiency expenditure shows that only nine out 77 provinces are efficient score is 54 percent and the average output efficiency score is 87 percent. As for the DEA results for technical efficiency expenditure shows that only nine out of 77 provinces are efficient in providing health care programs given the percentage number of doctors, midwives, and accredited health facilities by the Philippine Health Insurance Corporation. The average input efficiency score is 79 percent, and the average output efficiency score is 80 percent. This study has shown the importance of DEA in analyzing the efficiency of delivery of public health services in provinces using expenditure, number of available health care providers and the presence of accredited health units vis-à-vis environmental sanitation and maternal and child health care programs. DEA can rationalize the allocation of budgets among similar health units in order to further improve the efficiency in the delivery of health services in provinces. Moreover, benchmarking using DEA results can improve the accountability of provincial health units in the utilization of their budgets in order to further increase the reach of province-based health programs which could lead to a marked improvement in the health of Filipinos.