Efficiency measurement with data envelopment analysis: An application in İzmir state hospitals

The increase in elderly population, growth in demand for health services, the spread of chronic diseases and innovations in health technologies increase the cost of health services and also lead to an increase in total health expenditures. Therefore, efficient and effective use of limited resources is highly important in terms of the continuity of the services. In this study it's aimed to assess relative efficiency of all public hospitals operating in İzmir province. In this context, it is aimed to measure efficiency of decision making units in prospect of constant return to scale and variable return to scale, calculate to scale efficiency, determine to improvements for bring inefficient units to the efficient level. It is also aimed to determine the ranking of effective decision-making units within themselves through the calculated super efficiency scores. The number of actual hospital beds, physicians and nurses are used as input variables; the number of outpatients, discharged patients and surgeries are used as output variables. The data for the years 2014, 2015 and 2016 used in this research were obtained with written permission from the Ministry of Health, Statistics and Analysis Information Systems Department. The Dea Solver package program was used for the analysis carried out. General state hospitals, branch hospitals, education and research hospitals are constitute population of the study. No sample was selected within the scope of the study and analyzes were conducted with the entire study population. As a result of the analyzes conducted, the number of the scale efficient hospitals is found to be 8 in 2014, 10 in 2015 and 6 in 2016, with effective results on the assumption of constant return to scale and variable return to scale. The average efficiency scores of public hospitals operating in İzmir increased from 2014 to 2015, but it is decreased in 2016 compared to the previous year. It is important to increase the number of patients discharged and the number of operations so that ineffective hospitals can reach the efficacy level.