Measuring Efficiency in Clinical Departments Using the DEA Approach - A Case of the Polish Hospital

Evaluating hospital's efficiency in Poland is vital considering in the light of limited public funds dedicated to healthcare. As such, employing a mechanism capable of identifying inefficiencies by hospital administrators would be conducive to the quality of the services delivered. The aim of this article is to ascertain the merits of efficiency measures as instruments of monitoring and distributing resources, by focusing on the clinical departments of provincial specialist hospital in Olsztyn in Poland. The hospital under perspective, provides diagnostics, therapy, care, specialist advice, education prevention and health promotion. Efficiency of hospital departments was measured using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). The distribution of efficiency and the ranking of clinical departments was compared across surgical and non-surgical department's profile. Input and output data was collected from the hospital database for 19 578 patients admitted to 14 departments between January and June 2017. The research shows that only 5 clinical departments (35.71%) run efficiently. These were the Departments of Hematology, Gynecology, Vascular Surgery, Rehabilitation and Ophthalmology. Most of them provide surgical procedures. The least efficient was the Department of Transplantology and General Surgery. The paper's findings could potentially inform manager's choices in relation to increasing efficiency. Since hospital managers have more control over their inputs, they may devote more attention to the examination of total inefficiencies generated by excessive input usage.