Performance of hospital services in Ontario: DEA with truncated regression approach

In this work, we analyze production performance of hospital services in Ontario (Canada), by investigating its key determinants. Using data for the years 2003 and 2006, we follow the two-stage approach of Simar and Wilson (2007) [76]. Specifically, we use Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) at the first stage to estimate efficiency scores and then use truncated regression estimation with double-bootstrap to test the significance of explanatory variables. We also examine distributions of efficiency across geographic locations, size and teaching status. We find that several organizational factors such as occupancy rate, rate of unit-producing personnel, outpatient–inpatient ratio, case-mix index, geographic locations, size and teaching status are significant determinants of efficiency.