Data sources
The study focused on three levels of health facilities: CHCs, BHCs, and SHCs, although there are six types of facilities delivering BPHS in Afghanistan. The selected three types of facilities consume the most resources for BPHS. Each level provides services of various complexity and cover different population sizes; hence, requiring different categories and number of staffing.
To assess efficiency of health facilities we obtained facility health expenditure data from the Expenditure Management Information System (EMIS) which is centrally managed by the Afghanistan Ministry of Public Health. The EMIS includes indicators on health facility human resource expenditures (e.g. medical, administrative, and supporting staff), capital investments (e.g. equipment, machinery and tools), and other recurrent costs of operating health facilities and providing health services. These are our input variables. In addition, we acquired from the Afghanistan Health Management Information System (HMIS) data on a number of outpatient visits, by type of service received. These are our output variables. The HMIS also provided information on the number of different types of personnel employed in each health facility (additional input factors).
Both EMIS and HMIS have been institutionalized in Afghanistan for many years. They are collected quarterly and are considered to be reliable. All data were extracted for the full 2016 calendar year.
Afghanistan has 34 provinces. Only 31 provinces report to the EMIS. These are the provinces in which health facilities are operated by NGOs. All health facilities in these provinces were considered for analysis. We excluded facilities with ‘outlier’ expenditures – facilities whose expenditure was plus/minus three standard deviations from the mean facility expenditure. This resulted in a total of 1,263 facilities included in the analysis: 272 CHCs, 571 BHCs and 420 SHCs.
Analytic approach
To estimate the efficiency of health facilities, we used Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), a classic non-parametric approach to calculating a measure of technical efficiency. The DEA uses the following formula to assign an efficiency score to each health facility. Specifically, we used input-oriented DEA with variable returns to scale [,,]. This approach would help understand potential savings for given outputs. The efficiency scores were estimated as a ratio of weighted outputs to weighted inputs (see formula below), where the weights were calculated by the statistical software automatically by maximizing the ratio for each decision making unit under the evaluation, while ensuring that the ratio, when applied to other decision making units, would be between 0 and 1. As DEA has been widely described elsewhere [8,9,10], the derivation of efficiency scores using DEA is not repeated here.

An advantage of DEA is that it provides considerable flexibility in data selection and can incorporate multiple input and output variables, which can be continuous, ordinal, or categorical. [3].
In this study, we conducted two DEAs. In the first, we calculated separate efficiency scores for the three levels of facilities: SHC, BHC, and CHC (referred to as “separate efficiency scores”). By the scores we assumed that each type of facilities has its own production frontier. With the calculated input-oriented efficiency scores from this analysis, we were able to estimate potential savings, which is the product of health expenditure and the complement of the efficiency scores. DEA estimates an efficiency score for each health facility, ranging from 0 to 1. An efficiency score of 1 means that the health facility has maximum efficiency, while an efficiency score of 0 suggests that the health facility does not produce any outputs. As the efficiency estimation for the three types of facilities used different production frontiers, the efficiency scores could not be compared across different type facilities. In the second DEA, we pooled all three types of facilities together, assuming a single production frontier (referred to as “pooled efficiency scores”). The efficiency scores from the pooled sample allows for the comparison of efficiency scores across different types of facilities.
To measure expenditures (inputs) we included the following indicators: (1) number of clinical personnel reported for the fourth quarter, (2) number of non-clinical personnel, including administrative and supporting staff, reported for the fourth quarter, (3) non-personnel recurrent expenditure (total for the year), and (4) capital expenditure (total for the year). These four indicators capture most of the resources used by health facilities to provide services. While expenditure information in the EMIS is in Afghan currency, the Ministry of Public Health makes programmatic decisions in United States Dollars (USD). Therefore, we converted all expenditure data into USD, using the annual average Afghanistan Central Bank official exchange rate. In the multivariate analysis expenditure variables were converted to their logarithmic form.
To measure services (output) we included number of visits (by adults and children of all ages) associated with the following conditions in the course of the year: (1) acute respiratory infection, (2) diarrhea, (3) peptic disorder, (4) number of immunizations administered (5) number of antenatal and postnatal visits, and (6) number of all other facility visits.
These input and output indicators were used to create the health-facilities efficiency scores. The scores range 0–1, where 1 means maximum efficiency. In the multivariate analysis these scores are the dependent variable. Our explanatory variables are: (1) proportion of facility personnel who are supporting staff (calculated by dividing the number of supporting staff by the number of all facility personnel; (2) proportion of capital costs, from among total annual costs; and (3) province hardship category. The latter is a measure used by the Ministry of Public Health in deciding salary scales, and reflects remoteness and the security situation in the province. It consists of four categories. We created three dummy variables, with category one (least hardship category) as the reference category. These variables were selected based on knowledge of the health system in Afghanistan which suggested that these factors might influence efficiency.
Statistical analysis
To start, we conducted descriptive analysis of all the variables included in the efficiency calculations, as well as the explanatory variables. For continuous variables, means and standard deviations were calculated, while frequencies are shown for categorical variables. We then used ordinary least square regression to assess determinants of variation in efficiency at the health facility level, first by type of health facilities and then by pooling the three types of facilities together. The dependent variables were the facility-specific efficiency scores calculated by the DEA, separated by type of facility and pooled together, for the two analyses respectively. Data were extracted in MS Excel. All statistical analyses were conducted using STATA v.15, except the calculation of the DEA score, which was calculated using R (version 3.5.3).