Many countries are facing the increasing cost of healthcare services and the low efficiency of public hospitals. These issues are also evident in China. This paper offers a comprehensive assessment of the efficiency of public hospitals operating in China's 31 regions. The impact of the third round of reform of the health system in 2009 is assessed based on the three-stage data envelopment analysis procedure. The time period from 2011 to 2018 is covered in this study. Due to different functions performed by the public hospitals and other ones, the number of patients with infectious diseases is incorporated as an output variable reflecting the social function. The outpatient visits and inpatient visits are considered to reflect the outputs related to the private functions. The results imply an increase in the mean efficiency of public hospitals from 0.927 to 0.981 after taking the impact of environmental variables and statistic noise into account. These results indicate that the efficiency of public hospitals is dependent in the operational environment. There are 11 regions whose hospitals operate on the efficiency frontier during the whole period covered. Therefore, the Chinese government should reasonably design and apply the regulatory tools to improve the efficiency of public hospitals.
Keywords: Social Functions; efficiency estimation; public hospitals; three-stage DEA.