Determining the Technical Efficiency of Hospitals affiliated with Kashan University of Medical Sciences using Data Envelopment Analysis: 2011-2016

Hospitals, as the biggest and costliest operative units of ministry of health and medical education, have always faced budget deficit. Hence, efficiency scores of hospitals are one of the important criteria that managers and policy makers can use for future planning to improve the performance of the hospitals. This paper presents data envelopment analysis (DEA) to assess relative efficiency of hospitals with multiple inputs and multiple outputs. We use cross-efficiency score for ranking the top hospitals and also Malmquist productivity index for estimating productivity growth. This study evaluates the efficiency of hospitals operated by Kashan University of Medical Sciences from 2011 to 2016, in which input parameters are the number of physicians, nurses and beds and output parameters are the number of discharged patients. GAMS software application was used for data analysis. Based on the results, the average technical efficiency of understudy hospitals was 0.71. On the other hand, inefficient hospitals faced input increase to achieve the same output. The average productivity index at hospitals during study years was 0.909, indicating that the productivity index reduced on average 10% during this time range. Hospitals affiliated with Kashan University of Medical Sciences were technically inefficient. Thus, at these hospitals, technical, pure technical and scale efficiency did not follow a fixed trend, changing continually. Moreover, hospitals did not use their resources optimally and encountered decrease in productivity. Therefore, it is recommended that hospitals’ functionality be compared with national and international standards.