Relative Efficiency of Third-Grade General Public Hospitals in Zhejiang Province, China

Bcakground: New Medical Reform was initiated from 2009 in China, of which public hospital reform is one of the core content. Analyzing the relative efficiency of Tertiary public hospital contributes to identify how to achieve their maximum outputs under the given inputs. Methods: Data envelopment approach and Malmquist index was used in this study. The input variables we used were the number of employees and the actual number of open beds, the output variables were the number of patient discharge and the number of the outpatients (included emergency visits). Results: According to the output-oriented DEA models, efficiency value of Traditional Chinese medicine hospital is 0.83, the western medicine hospital is 0.77. Economies scale trend of two types of hospitals has statistically significant difference. Malmquist index of productivity change of two types of hospitals improved because of the technological innovation, but the mean scale-change has decreased. Conclusion: It appears that the expected benefits from Phased health system reform in China have been partially achieved. Health policy shall strictly control scale of large hospitals, take different policy for western medicine and traditional Chinese medicine hospitals, facilitate extensive development change to connotative development, and boost quality management and delicacy management so that realize sustainable development.