Benchmarking in primary health care: An application of the stochasticd frontier analysis and the grades of membership approach to Portuguese family health units

A Work Project, presented as part of the requirements for the Award of a Masters Degree in Economics from the NOVA – School of Business and Economics

This work aims at assessing the Portuguese family health units, whose creation was part of the primary health care reform that began in 2005, in terms of their performance. Family health units are ranked with regard to cost efficiency – stochastic frontier analysis is the econometric technique followed – and the establishment of extreme profiles they compare to is determined through the grades of membership approach. The definition of specific goals for each family health unit to achieve in terms of performance are delivered as the final output of this work, which should allow for improvement of efficiency levels.