Investigation of efficiency levels in the use of resources in the health sector: an analysis of the micro-regions of Minas Gerais

Abstract

This work aimed to analyze efficiency levels in some homogeneous institutional units of the health sector, taking the micro-regions of the State of Minas Gerais as reference. The study contextualizes the decentralization process that started in the 1990s in Brazil, which generated the need for the optimization of the public municipal expenses, and, at the same time, increased the demand for higher quality in the essential public services such as health. Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) was used in order to quantify and compare the efficiency in using the resources to provide health services in 66 micro-regions of the State of Minas Gerais. The results demonstrate that the performance of the micro-regions in optimizing the resources can be considered satisfactory, because most of them are concentrated in scores above the State's average. However, the high intraregional diversity is a worrisome fact, since the high standard deviations point out that there are disparities in health resources management.