Search results

In a context of international economic crisis the improvement in the efficiency and productivity of public services is seen as a way to maintain high-quality levels at lower costs. Increased productivity can be promoted through benchmarking exercises, where key performance indicators (KPIs), individually or aggregated, are used to compare health units. The purpose of this paper is to describe a benchmarking platform, called Hospital Benchmarking (HOBE), where hospital’s services are used as the unit of analysis.

HOBE platform includes a set of managerial indicators through which hospital services’ are compared. The platform also benchmarks services through aggregate service indicators, and provides an aggregate measure of hospital’s performance based on a composite indicator of the service’s performances. These aggregate indicators were obtained through data envelopment analysis (DEA).

Some results are presented for Portuguese hospitals for the trial years of 2008 and 2009, for which data is publicly available. Details for the service-level analysis are provided for a sample hospital, as well as details on the aggregate performance resulting from services performances.

HOBE’s features and outcomes show that the platform can be used to guide management actions and to support the design of health policies by administrative authorities, provided that good quality and timely data are available, and that hospitals are involved in the design of the KPIs.

The platform is innovative in the sense that it bases its analysis on hospital’s services, which are in general more comparable among hospitals than indicators of hospital overall performance. In addition, it makes use of DEA to aggregate performance indicators, allowing for user choice in the inputs and outputs to be aggregated, and it proposes a novel model to aggregate service’s efficiencies into a single measure of hospital performance.

This work aims to characterize the risks companies deal with in the context of a pandemic, and to ascertain which risk type is most present in Portuguese organizations. It is also intended to verify whether there are differences in the various risk types between companies that had or did not have a plan or strategy to act in a pandemic, such as the one caused by COVID-19.

A quantitative methodology was used, based on the application of a questionnaire survey targeting the Portuguese companies. The sample is composed of 1,647 Portuguese companies, which were queried through a questionnaire survey that analyses different risk types. Then, the software R was used to treat the results.

The results show that companies are exposed and vulnerable to uncertain events, and five risk types were formed: legal, image, financial, strategic and operational. There is a bigger concern about the management of financial risks.

Academics and companies can become more aware and master the concept of risk and its different branches, which consequently favours the adoption of strategies to better manage and plan risk.

The literature on international businesses and their risks assumes that all crises are the same. However, the COVID-19 pandemic, besides causing a recession, obliges people and companies to adapt to a new scenario. Risks become more important to companies, in a way that had not been academically studied.