Efforts to improve the efficiency of the hospital sector in the National Health Service (NHS) have concentrated on measuring the unit costs of service provision. Hospitals identified as having high unit costs are considered poor performers. Several indices have been constructed to measure unit...

We review statistical methods for estimating and interpreting league tables used to infer hospital quality with a primary focus on methods for partitioning variation into two types: (a) that associated with within-hospital variation for a homogeneous group of patients and (b) that produced by...