do hospitals affiliated with the kurdistan university of medical sciences perform efficiently? non-parametric data envelopment analysis

background: one way to improve the performance of hospitals, the largest resource-consuming units in the healthcare sector, is to continuously evaluate their performance.objective: the current study assessed the performance of hospitals affiliated with the kurdistan university of medical sciences using data envelopment analysis (dea).methods: this retrospective descriptive-analytic study used dea to assess efficiency types (technical, managerial, and scale) in hospitals of the kurdistan university of medical sciences (n = 12) in the years 2007 to 2011. the number of active beds, nurses, physicians (general and specialist), and other staff were inputs; inpatient admission and occupied bed days were outputs. stata version 12 was used for data analysis.results: the mean technical, scale, and managerial efficiency values were 0.85, 0.89, and 0.95, respectively. the highest and lowest slack inputs were nurses and active beds, respectively.conclusion: the findings indicate that kurdistan hospitals were less than appropriately efficient during the studied period. they also suggest that there is a capacity of about 15% for enhancing output in hospitals (compared with the most efficient studied hospitals) without increasing costs or inputs.