IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/plo/pone00/0267490.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Do China rural traditional Chinese medicine hospitals provide efficient healthcare to the people? Empirical study from 2013 to 2018 using data envelopment analysis

Author

Listed:
  • Qian Bai
  • Xiaowei Man
  • Baolin Hong
  • Bo Li
  • Xuefeng Shi
  • Ying Bian

Abstract

Rural traditional Chinese medicine hospitals bear responsibilities of providing efficient medical services for rural residents. Efficiency assessments have previously been conducted in single province. This study aimed to investigate the technical efficiency of rural traditional Chinese medicine hospitals across China from 2013 to 2018, with the application of super slack-based measure data envelopment analysis. In total, 1219 hospitals covering 28 provinces were included as sample hospitals. Overall, hospitals performed technically less efficiently but presented with an increasing trend. Redundancy and insufficiency existed in health input and output variables, respectively. Notably, optimizing input variables was found to make more substantial improvement in hospital efficiency. Provincial and regional disparities were also observed in hospital efficiency. In conclusion, rural traditional Chinese medicine hospitals have experienced slight improvement in efficiency during the study period, however, their efficiency was still in a relatively low level with ample room for improvement. Meanwhile, regional coordinated development should also be noticed in this process.

Suggested Citation

  • Qian Bai & Xiaowei Man & Baolin Hong & Bo Li & Xuefeng Shi & Ying Bian, 2022. "Do China rural traditional Chinese medicine hospitals provide efficient healthcare to the people? Empirical study from 2013 to 2018 using data envelopment analysis," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 17(4), pages 1-16, April.
    • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0267490
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0267490
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0267490
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0267490&type=printable
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1371/journal.pone.0267490?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0267490. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: plosone (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.