Efficiency in chronic illness care coordination: public-private collaboration models vs. traditional management

BACKGROUND: The aim of this paper is to analyze the differences in the coordination of chronic illness care between the different public hospital management models coexisting in the Spanish region of Madrid (25 hospitals) during the period 2013–2017. METHODS: The performance of hospitals might be affected by the characteristics of the population they serve and, therefore, this information should be taken into account when estimating efficiency measures. For this purpose, we apply the nonparametric Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) conditioned to some contextual variables and adapted to a dynamic framework, so that we can assess hospitals during a five-year period. The outputs considered are preventable hospitalizations, readmissions for heart failure and readmissions for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, whereas the inputs considered are the number of beds, personnel (physicians and other healthcare professionals) and total expenditure on goods and services. RESULTS: The results suggest that the level of efficiency demonstrated by the public-private collaboration models of hospital management is higher than traditionally managed hospitals throughout the analyzed period. Nevertheless, we notice that efficiency differences among hospitals are significantly reduced when contextual factors were taken into account. CONCLUSIONS: Hospitals managed under public-private collaboration models are more efficient than those under traditional management in terms of chronic illness care coordination, being this difference attributable to more agile and flexible management under the collaborative models. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary information accompanies this paper at 10.1186/s12913-020-05894-z.