Paper Title
Does Efficiency of Hospitals Lead to a Higher Quality of Care? (The Case of Jordanian Public Hospitals)

Abstract
This study aims to determine how hospital efficiency is related to hospital quality of care. More precisely, it deals with the question of how hospital mortality varies with different levels of hospital technical efficiency. The empirical results for a panel of 29 hospitals during a period between 2006 and 2015 indicate that in general, hospital mortality rate is positively affected by hospital technical efficiency. In addition, we found a significant positive relation between in-hospital mortality rate and both hospital size and case severity. Conversely, the duration of care in hospitals had a significant negative impact on in-hospital mortality. The results are derived by conducting a two-step analysis. In the first step, production stochastic frontier analysis is performed to calculate hospital yearly efficiency. In the second step, a count regression analysis is used to find the relation between in-hospital mortality and hospital yearly efficiency. Analysis was done using a newly available Jordanian public hospitals data set. Keywords - Hospitals efficiency. SFA . In-hospital mortality JEL classification: H11, L1, I11, I12, L25.