Do Hospitals Affiliated With the Kurdistan University of Medical Sciences Perform Efficiently? Non-parametric Data Envelopment Analysis

One way to improve the performance of hospitals, the largest resource-consuming units in the healthcare sector, is to continuously evaluate their performance. The current study assessed the performance of hospitals affiliated with the Kurdistan University of Medical Sciences using data envelopment analysis (DEA). This retrospective descriptive-analytic study used DEA to assess efficiency types (technical, managerial, and scale) in hospitals of the Kurdistan University of Medical Sciences (n = 12) in the years 2007 to 2011. The number of active beds, nurses, physicians (general and specialist), and other staff were inputs; inpatient admission and occupied bed days were outputs. Stata version 12 was used for data analysis. The mean technical, scale, and managerial efficiency values were 0.85, 0.89, and 0.95, respectively. The highest and lowest slack inputs were nurses and active beds, respectively. The findings indicate that Kurdistan hospitals were less than appropriately efficient during the studied period. They also suggest that there is a capacity of about 15% for enhancing output in hospitals (compared with the most efficient studied hospitals) without increasing costs or inputs.