ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the engineering concept of efficiency and how increase efficiency may help improving healthcare delivery in real-life situation. While the engineering efficiency is determined by the ratio of outcome to input effort, medical efficiency can be similarly considered. Two ways of increasing medical efficiency are discussed in details: increasing outputs by the same amount of input effort and providing same amount of outputs by the reduced input efforts. Supporting medical evidences are provided to strengthen the usefulness in the pursuit of efficiency in medicine. However, the pursuit of efficiency in medicine must take into account the issues of healthcare quality and patient safety, thus quality and safety cannot be compromised by the increase of efficiency.
