Substantiating the choice of regional healthcare effectiveness indicators

In the context of modern demographic trends related to population aging, as well as due to the ongoing pro-natalist policy, new challenges arise for healthcare, coupled with an increasing contradiction between the growing demand for medical services from the population and the limited available human, material and financial resources. Consequently, the choice of criteria for evaluating the effectiveness of healthcare becomes crucially important from the practical perspective. Russian and foreign researchers propose various approaches to the development of such criteria and to the way in which the assessment procedure itself is carried out. However, so far, there is no well-established list of criteria for evaluating healthcare effectiveness. The aim of this work is to substantiate the indicators for assessing the effectiveness of the regional healthcare system, applicable to solving optimization problems. The information base of the study includes Russian and foreign research on the topic in question, and statistical data characterizing the functioning of regional healthcare and the state of public health. We consider approaches to determining the effectiveness of healthcare at the levels of individual medical technology, medical organization, and the industry as a whole and reveal strengths and weaknesses of existing approaches to measuring healthcare effectiveness. Special attention is paid to the analysis of current approaches to assessing the effectiveness of management decisions in the healthcare sector. It is proved that the correlation of “input” and “output” is the most relevant method for solving optimization problems simulating variants of management decisions in the healthcare sector. Theoretical novelty of our research lies in substantiating a number of indicators for assessing the effectiveness of regional healthcare. Based on the analysis of data from Russian and foreign studies, as well as taking into account the correlation analysis, we propose to consider life expectancy at birth, mortality of the population over the working age, mortality from diseases of the circulatory system and one-year mortality of patients with malignant neoplasms as the resulting indicators of the functioning of regional healthcare. In the future, these indicators will be used as target parameters for solving optimization problems in the field of regional healthcare using its agent-based model. The proposed approach to assessing the effectiveness of regional healthcare can serve as a theoretical basis for an automated management decision support system in this area, which determines the practical significance of the research findings.