Evaluation of OECD countries in terms of selected health indicators and by Data Envelope Analysis with COVID-19 pandemic process data

The aim of this study is to evaluate the efficiency of the health system performance of OECD member countries using selected health indicators and Covid-19 pandemic process data. In the evaluation of the performance of the health systems of the countries, the number of patient beds (per 1000 people), the number of physicians (per 1000 people), the number of nurses (per 1000 people), and the health expenditure per capita as input variables, and the number of deaths (per one million people) and the full The number of people vaccinated was used. The universe of the research consisted of 38 OECD member countries. In the study, Data Envelopment Analysis, which is one of the most frequently used methods in the performance comparison of country health systems, was used. The productivity scores of the countries were calculated according to the input-oriented Charnes, Cooper, Rhodes model used in the Data Envelopment Analysis. The analysis of input and output variables in the research was carried out with the "DEAP" package program. As a result of the analysis, the average productivity value of the health systems of OECD countries was calculated as 0.725. It has been determined that 13.15% of the countries' health systems are efficient and 86.84% are inefficient. The country with the lowest productivity was Austria with 0.428. Turkey, Mexico, South Korea, Costa Rica and Colombia were among the productive countries. The reason why these countries are found efficient is that they can obtain output variables with few input variables and Data Envelopment Analysis measures relative efficiency. Therefore, it has been concluded that this situation does not indicate that productive countries have better health outcomes than inefficient countries. Keywords: Performance Measurement, Data Envelopment Analysis, Covid-19, OECD