Emergency medical resource allocation among hospitals with non-regressive production technology: A DEA-based approach

This paper proposes an approach for medical resource allocation among hospitals under public health emergencies based on data envelopment analysis (DEA). First, the DEA non-regressive production technology is adopted to ensure that the DMU can always refer to the most advanced production technology throughout all production periods. Based on the non-regressive production technology, two efficiency evaluation models are presented to calculate the efficiencies of DMUs before and after resource allocation. Our theoretical analysis shows that all the DMUs can be efficient after medical resource allocation, and thus a novel resource allocation possibility set is developed. Further, two objectives are considered and a bi-objective resource allocation model is developed. One objective is to maximize the output target realizability of the DMUs, while the other is to ensure the allocated resource to each DMU fits with its operation size, preperformance, and operation practice (i.e., proportion of critically ill patients). Additionally, a trade-off model is proposed to solve the bi-objective model to obtain the final resource allocation results. The proposed approach contributes by ensuring that the medical resources are allocated in such a way that they can all be efficiently used as well as considering multiple objectives and practical constraints that make the approach more fitted with the practical application scenarios. Finally, a case study of 30 hospitals in Wuhan during the COVID-19 epidemic is applied to illustrate the proposed approach.