Performance Measurement and Achievable Targets for Public Hospitals.

This paper proposes an iterative process for determining what we define as a "reasonable frontier efficiency," a concept that establishes future targets according to their current level of performance. Our "reasonable frontier" has the following properties: (1) it is underpinned on the efficiency framework, (2) it detects the presence of outliers and proposes a procedure to establish the influence introduced by extreme observations, and (3) it sorts out the problem of data masking. The proposed method is applied to a sample of Spanish hospitals. The results obtained confirm the applicability of the proposal made.