2008 Volume 20 Issue 1 Pages 15-33
In this study. we assessed the effect of Order Entry System on hospital productivity and efficiency for inpatient care by using municipal hospital panel data in Japan. We developed hospital production function for inpatient care. which had annual discharge cases per bed as a dependent variable. Then 3 kinds of stochastic frontier analyses were applied to the production function to estimate technical efficiency score. Also we examined the effect of hospital characteristics including installation of Order Entry System on the hospital productivity and technical efficiency.
As the result，we found positive effect of the installation of Order Entry System on hospital production frontier shift and technical efficiency improvement. This effect was not related to the relocation or renewal of hospital facilities. Among 3 models，true fixed effect model showed the highest mean value estimate and the narrowest deviation estimate of technical efficiency score. However，the efficiency score of true fixed effect model was not correlated with the scores of other 2 models.
These results suggested the possible positive effect of Order Entry System on hospital production frontier shift and technical efficiency improvement for inpatient care.
