The survey of hospital size effect on technical efficiency in social security hospitals

Hospitals are considered as the greatest and most expensive operational units in health systems. A hospital bed costs almost 30 million in one year and it has just 20 million revenue، as a result، in this study، the relationship between these above variables were investigated in Social Security Hospitals in Iran. This was a cross-sectional study from 2005-2007 that was conducted on 64 general hospitals of Social Security System. In order to assessment efficiency، Win Deep software was run and the parametric tests were applied to compare the hospitals` efficiency according to their bed number (size) at the statistical level of 0. 05. Results showed that the average of technical efficiency in upper 100 bed hospitals was 0. 976 in comparison with the average of 0. 962 in lower 100 bed ones. In addition، the analysis of Independent T-Test between two groups presented a higher efficiency in the greater hospitals (P=0. 04). It is considered that the bed number can be one of the effective factors on efficiency index in hospitals. Although it is important to pay adequate attention to other inputs rather than bed number in order to achieve optimum level of efficiency in hospitals.