The interplay between regulation and efficiency: Evidence from the Austrian hospital inpatient sector

•We examined hospital inpatient performance in Austria between 2009 and 2012.•We applied a non-oriented and non-radial bootstrapped efficiency approach and non-parametric post-efficiency analyses.•We found small improvement potential for highly regulated inputs, but considerable improvement potential for non-regulated inputs.•Hospitals at different care levels showed significantly different results.

The Austrian health policy aims to maintain and even expand high-quality health care. The implementation of an integrated master plan, which contains input and output target values for the overall health care system, is an important regulatory intervention. To support the regulatory authorities, efficiency studies that simultaneously reveal input and output improvement potential can be promising. To serve this purpose, we computed bootstrapped non-oriented super-efficiency measures to identify any improvement potential in inputs and outputs for the Austrian hospital inpatient sector for four years. Variations in hospital efficiency were investigated using non-parametric post-efficiency analyses.