Measuring the efficiency of health systems in Asia: a data envelopment analysis

OBJECTIVE: This study aims to estimate the technical efficiency of health systems in Asia. SETTINGS: The study was conducted in Asian countries. METHODS: We applied an output-oriented data envelopment analysis (DEA) approach to estimate the technical efficiency of the health systems in Asian countries. The DEA model used per-capita health expenditure (all healthcare resources as a proxy) as input variable and cross-country comparable health outcome indicators (eg, healthy life expectancy at birth and infant mortality per 1000 live births) as output variables. Censored Tobit regression and smoothed bootstrap models were used to observe the associated factors with the efficiency scores. A sensitivity analysis was performed to assess the consistency of these efficiency scores. RESULTS: The main findings of this paper…