Investigating influencing factors of regional healthcare efficiency: a case study of China

Healthcare as a kind of service is closely related to human health, but its uneven distribution among regions could affect the equity of residents' access to the service and lead to the unbalanced development of healthcare levels. Therefore, this article establishes an integrated model by means of the stochastic frontier analysis method to evaluate regional healthcare efficiency and analyse its influencing factors. Specifically, the distribution and change trend of healthcare technical output (TO) efficiency and health output (HO) efficiency are investigated from the temporal and spatial perspectives, and then the influencing factors of the two types of healthcare efficiency are explored, respectively. Taking China as a case study, the results show that there are obvious regional differences in TO efficiency as a whole, where the values of the eastern and central regions are significantly higher, while the western and northeast regions have lower TO efficiency. Economic, social, and regional factors have a significant influence on both TO efficiency and HO efficiency, among which the impacts of population density on the two types of efficiency are opposite. Accordingly, some policy recommendations have been put forward for improving regional healthcare efficiency.