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. 2023 Feb 8:9:20552076231154375.
doi: 10.1177/20552076231154375. eCollection 2023 Jan-Dec.

Impact of the development of information society on healthcare efficiency: Empirical evidence from 31 Chinese provinces

Yuanrong Hu  1 , Ying Wang  2 , Shengkang Lu  1 , Yongqing Li  3
Affiliations

Impact of the development of information society on healthcare efficiency: Empirical evidence from 31 Chinese provinces

Yuanrong Hu et al. Digit Health. .

Abstract

The development of information society has deeply changed the style of the healthcare service delivery and medical information access. This study aims to investigate how the information society development affects the efficiency of healthcare system in China, and explore provincial disparities in the impact. Based on the two-stage Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) framework, this paper uses a panel data from 31 Chinese provinces from 2014 to 2017 to estimate efficiency of healthcare service and analyze the influence of the development of information society on efficiency. With the information society index (ISI) increased from 0.423 to 0.488 during the sample period, the healthcare efficiency experienced a slight decrease from 0.892 to 0.869. Moreover, the pure technical efficiency (PTE) is much lower than the scale efficiency (SE), and thus is the key to enhance the overall technical efficiency (TE). The time-fixed Tobit regression analysis suggests that information society development leads to a significant increase in PTE, but results in a decrease in SE, and therefore has little effect on TE. Further analysis reveals that the impact differs sharply between low-efficiency and high-efficiency provinces. For the low-efficiency provinces, the TE increases significantly with the development of the information society, mainly due to a considerable increase in PTE. In contrast, the TE decreases for the high-efficiency provinces, mainly caused by a decrease in SE. This paper highlights the importance of information infrastructure investment in healthcare system and the application of emerging information technologies to breakout the time and space boundaries of healthcare services in improving overall efficiency. In inefficient provinces, it is also necessary to properly control the growth of healthcare inputs.

Keywords: DEA; Tobit model; healthcare efficiency; healthcare service; information society.

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Conflict of interest statement

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
The growth trend of medical inputs and outputs and population in 2015–2017.
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
Mean value of te, PTE, se, ISI of 31province from 2014–2017. Note: TE, PTE and SE represented the mean value of technical efficiency, pure technical efficiency and scale efficiency scores of 31 provinces respectively.
Figure 3.
Figure 3.
The scatter plot of efficiency scores and ISI.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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