• Niloufar Ghafari Someh, Mir Saman Pishvaee, Seyed Jafar Sadjadi, and Roya Soltani.
• Department of Industrial Engineering, Science and Research Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran.
• J Eval Clin Pract. 2020 Oct 1; 26 (5): 1504-1511.

Rationale, Aims, And ObjectivesThe main purpose of this paper is to measure the efficiency and ranking of medical diagnostic laboratories by applying a network data envelopment analysis (NDEA).MethodsIn this study, each medical diagnostic laboratory is considered as a decision-making unit (DMU), and an NDEA model is utilized to calculate the efficiency of each medical diagnostic laboratory. Therefore, we design a series of four-stage system composed of three main laboratory processes (the pretest process, the test process, and the posttest process). We also consider sustainability criteria in order to cover social, economic, and environmental problems of health care organizations.ResultsThe results show that three of the 22 considered laboratories are efficient. Therefore, the NDEA approach can lead to performance scores and ultimately real ranking. Also, the average efficiency scores show that the decrease of the reception unit's efficiency results in a decrease of the efficiency of each laboratory. Therefore, the laboratories can increase the number of patients. Along with the intermediate values of the reception unit and the sampling unit, the efficiency of the reception unit increases, which results in an increase for the overall efficiency of each laboratory.ConclusionThe proposed model can appropriately help the administrators and managers to identify inefficient units in their laboratory and ultimately improve the laboratory performance.© 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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