Many hospital rankings are based on algorithms and weights elicited by experts. The paper attempts to build rankings of Polish district hospitals using the TOPSIS method and to examine the sensitivity of the results to the changes in weights. We considered 11 large and 34 medium-sized hospitals. The criteria set consists of man-days total, profit/loss on sales, contract with the National Health Fund, return on assets (ROA) and return on equity (ROE). Because of this, rankings consider different spheres in which hospitals perform, including the financial aspect and their main goal, i.e., treating patients. The results show that despite the overall high similarity of rankings, the benchmarking based on rankings should be done with care as the positions of some individual hospitals changed to a great degree.
The most recent big reform of the Polish health system took place in 2017 and introduced a basic hospital service provision system. Hospitals were able to be included in the network and receive flat-rate financing from the National Health Fund. The current paper aims to assess how the relative situation of hospitals changed between 2015 and 2018. This study is based on multicriteria rankings which take into account the values of profit/loss on sales, the contract with the NHF, the income from health services outside the NHF, the income from rental and lease, the employment of doctors, the employment of nurses, liabilities, operating costs, and interns and residents per hospital bed. The similarity of rankings constructed using different methods is shown. Based on the results of the Chi-squared test, it can be concluded that the inclusion in the network does not affect whether the relative situation of a hospital between 2015 and 2018 improved or not. In the regression analysis, the dummy variable for level 1 hospital was negatively related to the median rank; however, this impact was not statistically significant.
Decisions regarding agricultural production involve multiple goals. A multicriteria approach al-lows decision makers to consider more aspects of the decision scenario, although it also leads to other problems, such as difficulties with the selection of goals or criteria, as well as assigning them appropri-ate weights. It is argued that not only do goals vary depending on the decision-makers’ socioeconomic features, but their relative importance changes as well. A simulation study has been conducted based on the Farm Accountancy Data Network (FADN) database. We use the distance-to-the-negative-solu-tion maximization model. Seven sets of criteria and different sets of weights are considered. The main purpose of the study is to determine the impact of weights on the quality of the model. Quality is as-sessed by comparing the optimal and observed values of the decision variables. The results lead to the conclusion that the differences between the quality of various models are small.
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