Analysis of the performance of public and private hospitals serving the Brazilian Unified National Health System

This article aims to analyze the performance of the Brazilian Unified National Health System (SUS, acronym in Portuguese) hospital network based on the national databases of the Brazilian Hospital Information System (SIH, acronym in Portuguese) and the Brazilian National Registry of Health Establishments (CNES, acronym in Portuguese). The research used a set of indicators covering the production of admissions, the profile, quality and performance of care, associated with hospital size and legal nature. For data analysis, the Analysis of Variance with Tukey-Kramer test was used to highlight the differences between public and private hospitals, the moderation analysis to verify the effect of hospital size and the Pabon Lasso model to integrate the results. The results show that the increase in the number of beds influences the performance of the indicators differently for public and private hospitals. Public hospitals showed higher gains in scale efficiency with the increase in beds, whereas private non-profit hospitals showed a higher performance in the set of indicators and a more balanced performance in the different sizes. The application of the Pabon Lasso model showed that small hospitals, both public and private, perform poorly. It also showed that from medium-sized onwards, public and private hospitals perform well. However, each category displays particularities in its performance profile, reflecting a diversity of practices and operational results. This study thus confirms previous findings that hospital performance tends to improve as the number of beds increases, but also reveals that it varies significantly depending on the legal nature these institutions.