ArticleFrontiers in health services2026
Crisis-time efficiency in Eastern Poland's regional hospitals (2015-2024): a data envelopment analysis.
Article in Frontiers in health services, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
0 citing papers in PubMed.
No citing paper in PubMed yet.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Hospitals in Poland's border regions face persistent staffing pressures and rising costs, and the COVID-19 pandemic further disrupted activity. We assessed year-by-year changes in operational and financial efficiency in three regional hospitals (BIA, LOM, SUW) in Podlaskie Voivodeship, on NATO's eastern flank, over 2015-2024. Input-oriented Data Envelopment Analysis with CCR (CRS) and BCC (VRS) models was applied in two domains (operational and financial), and 95% bootstrap confidence intervals were calculated for efficiency scores. Operational efficiency declined during the pandemic and partially recovered thereafter. Before COVID-19, mean TE_CCR ranged from 0.607 (95% CI: 0.571-0.643) in LOM to 0.909 (0.833-0.989) in SUW. In 2020-2021, TE_CCR fell to 0.746 (0.704-0.783) in BIA and 0.399 (0.371-0.410) in LOM, with SUW decreasing to 0.810 (0.731-0.870). Post-pandemic values showed partial rebound: 0.858 (0.781-0.946) in BIA, 0.602 (0.565-0.634) in LOM, and 0.830 (0.758-0.913) in SUW. For LOM, operational TE_CCR dropped as low as 0.399 while financial TE_CCR remained at or above 0.94, illustrating a marked divergence between service delivery and financial performance. Across periods, PTE_BCC remained high, indicating scale efficiency as an important source of inefficiency. Financial efficiency showed a similar trough and recovery. Pandemic-period TE_CCR declined to 0.785 (0.766-0.798) in BIA and 0.951 (0.925-0.967) in SUW, while LOM remained relatively stable at 0.960 (0.947-0.970). Post-pandemic values increased to 0.928 (0.863-0.959) in BIA and 0.949 (0.901-0.979) in SUW, with LOM at 0.940 (0.919-0.958). Several confidence intervals did not include 1.00, indicating persistent inefficiency components. Overall, the decade shows a distinct pandemic-related dip followed by partial normalisation, with between-hospital heterogeneity and recurrent scale-related shortfalls in both domains. These results support routine, domain-specific efficiency monitoring as a tool for transparent performance tracking in strategically sensitive border regions. However, findings are constrained by the very small three-hospital sample, low discriminatory power of annual frontiers and the use of aggregated administrative data. Key methodological constraints are summarised in the Limitations section and should be considered when interpreting the findings.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.