The efficiency of hospitals: platform for sustainable health care system

Abstract

Hospitals and other providers of health services are facing enormous pressure to reduce costs while providing better services for patients without lowering their quality. By utilising a two-stage dynamic Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) approach, we explore whether there is a compromise between the production of services and the quality of services in the process of providing health care at the level of hospitals in Slovakia. While the first stage deals with the production efficiency of the hospitals, the second stage deals with the quality of service using patient-reported safety and satisfaction measures. The efficiency of hospitals in Slovakia is assessed, using hospital-level data from the database of INEKO for the years 2015 and 2018. In order to dynamically analyse the efficiency changes during the analysed period, the Malmquist index was used. The results revealed that overall technical efficiency increased over the analysed period. We can also see an increase within the service production division as well as service quality division. The results obtained represent a significant platform for the creators of health policy at the national level, and for the creators of the strategic regional health plans as a basis of continuous creation of mechanisms that are inevitable for providing a sustainable system of the Slovak health care at the regional level. The global threats of epidemics, such as COVID-19 pandemic, address the question of public health systems’ sustainability, which enormously increases.