Economic performance evaluation of community health service centers: a DEA-based cross-efficiency study

Health is a basic need for human survival and development. To achieve the goal of access to basic medical and health services for everyone, the operational performance of the health industry should be improved, and the allocation of resources in the health industry should be optimized. Because of this, we conduct an empirical analysis to evaluate the performance of community health service centers using cross-evaluation. In this study, we apply the data envelopment analysis (DEA) cross-efficiency model to empirically analyze the performance of 9 local community health service centers in Hefei, China. Through the empirical study, we obtain the following research results. (1) Haitang has the best performance among all community health service centers, whereas Sanxiaokou is the worst. (2) The performance of more than half of the community health service centers is significantly imbalanced. (3) Bozhoulu and Lindian do not perform well in all dimensions, that is, they have an imbalanced development. (4) Shuanggang is balanced but does not perform well in all dimensions. We conduct an empirical analysis with real-world data from 9 local community health service centers using the classical DEA cross-efficiency model and compare the results of the cross-efficiency (cross-evaluation) and CCR efficiency (self-evaluation) to better understand each community health service center's performance.