Abstract
Background: In the context of China’s aging population, comprehensive medical care, convenient diagnosis, comprehensive medical care and elderly care services are increasingly needed. But China's medical care and elderly care service system is still immature. This study aims to build a performance evaluation index/criteria system for the combination of medical care and elderly care services and present an empirical approach to assess them.Methods: A two-stage DEA approach is taken: 1) establish a performance evaluation index system for the combination of medical care and elderly care services, 2) adopt a two-stage DEA to evaluate the performance of 30 pension institutions in China, and 3) Determine and identify important criteria to improve the efficiency of pension institutions. Results: The results show that the two-stage DEA accounted for a relatively high affiance of medical and nursing care services, but resource allocation still needs to be further optimized. Institutions with ineffective DEA need to reduce the five factors of operations, management, fixed assets, technology and services in the input dimension. In the output dimension, the service evaluation effect and safety management effect need to be improved. The performance of combined old-age care and medical care in old-age institutions can be improved in terms of investment in fixed assets, methods of capital subsidies, supervision and management, as well as standardized operations.Conclusions: This study establish a performance evaluation index system for the combination of medical care and elderly care services and present a two-stage DEA empirical approach to evaluate the performance of 30 pension institutions in China, which provides the method supports for decision-makers and researchers in performing evaluation of pension institutions in China, outlines the suggestions in improving them.