코로나-19 전후 사립대학병원의 운영효율성 및 생산성변화

This study aimed to evaluate the operational efficiency of Korean medical institutions and compared operational efficiency and productivity changes before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. To ensure homogeneity in production methods, we selected general hospitals (GHs) and superior general hospitals (SHs) established by private universities for evaluation, considering each medical institution’s founder, purpose, role, and size. We adopted data envelopment analysis (DEA) to calculate operational efficiency and divided it into technical efficiency (TE), pure technical efficiency (PE) and scale efficiency (SE). We chose material costs, labor costs, other operating expenses, and medical equipment (PPE) as inputs, inpatient revenues, outpatient revenues, and other medical revenues as outputs. The main results were as follows: First, the TE and PE of GHs were 0.915 and 0.950, and those of SHs were 0.952 and 0.967, respectively. During the COVID-19 pandemic, GHs and SHs experienced a significant decrease in operational efficiency, with GHs being impacted more than SHs. Second, GHs had more scale losses due to the COVID-19 pandemic than SHs. Third, as the SE of GHs continued to decrease during the analysis period, efficiency loss due to the input-output scale showed a decreasing tendency. Fourth, before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, the material and labor costs of GHs and the labor cost of SHs had respective impacts on their operational efficiency. Last, in contrast to SHs, GHs exhibited increased productivity on average, a catch-up effect of approaching production frontiers, and technological progress in expanding production possibility sets.