Abstract:

The increased number of Oral and Dental Health Centers (ODHC) constructed under the Health Transformation Program (HTP) in Turkey meets an important healthcare service requirement. Evenly distribution of these dental services all over the country facilitates public access and allows these services to gain continuity. Accessibility to sufficiently distributed dental service centers increases citizens’ physical and also mental well-being, which is the therapeutic aspect of providing such public health services. Service’s social contribution is uncountable in terms of health issues for the people of the country. On the other hand, they need quite an amount of financial support. Therefore, authorities in the country, especially health service authorities should consider running a financial performance analysis plan. In the ODHC system, dentists are the main component for keeping the system running to provide interrupted, continuous and regular dental health services. For this reason, in the study, financial performance analyses of existing ODHCs w.r.t the profitability- per dentist were carried out with the help of Geographical Information Systems (GIS). Inverse Distance Weighting-IDW analysis technique provided by GIS is used to create several performances distribution maps were produced w.r.t the several factors per dentist which are effective on the financial performance of ODHCs. For the sake of understandability, the two most effective factors and the profitability as target factor are assigned to three primary colors for an effective visual interpretation of the relationship between these most effective factors in terms of profitability per dentist in GIS environment. When the outputs are evaluated, more understandable results on the relationship between the factors affecting the ODHCs’ financial performance are obtained by this visualization technique for128 public ODHCs in Turkey, and the importance levels of the variables are then revealed in terms of ODHC’s financial performances w.r.t. the locational data.

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