Longitudinal Evaluation on the Operation Index Applied to Public Hospitals in Pudong New District of Shanghai, China

The public hospital reform has lasted 5 years in China; however, the operation development status and trends of public hospitals have not been systematically evaluated in Pudong New District. We first applied the technology of longitudinal index to assess the development of public hospitals there. The quantitative data were mainly gathered by taking health statistics database from 2009 to 2014. The results showed that overall operating index presented a down-up trend, with the highest point in 2014 and the lowest point in 2012. Overall operating index, development foundation index, and management condition index were found to be statistically different (P = .010, P = .016, P = .031) in different years, whereas the service operation index and financial risk index were not so (P = .543, P = .228). Moreover, the results demonstrated that no obvious difference was observed in the overall operating index between the general and specialized hospitals (P = .327), which was the same in the 4 first-class indexes. However, there were statistical differences in the overall operating index and development foundation index among these 5 years (P = .018, P = .036), but none in the service operation index, management condition index, and financial risk index (P = .503, P = .062, P = .177). No interaction effects were discovered between year and hospital categories in the current study (P = .673, P = .375, P = .885, P = .152, P = .288).