Fuzzy hierarchy sensitive with Delphi method to evaluate hospital organization performance

The conventional accreditation policy of Taiwanese hospitals involves helping promote and executing national healthcare quality policies, certifying healthcare quality, supervising the management of health care organizations, pursuing a harmonious relationship between care providers and patients, and enhancing national healthcare quality. However, the quality indicators in use by Department of Health, Executive Yuan, Taiwan (DOH) cannot indicate overall organization performance of each hospital and assess hospital operating crisis. In many cases the preference model of the human decision maker is uncertain, and it is relatively difficult for the decision maker to provide exact numerical values for the comparison ratios. This study proposal fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP) and fuzzy sensitive analysis-based approach to resolve the uncertainty and imprecision of service evaluations during pre-negotiation stages, where the comparison judgments of a decision maker are represented as fuzzy triangular numbers. A novel fuzzy prioritization method, which derives crisp priorities (criteria weights and scores of alternatives) from consistent and inconsistent fuzzy comparison matrices, is also proposed. Importantly, the proposed model can provide Taiwan’s hospital accreditation policy a reference material, making it highly applicable for academic and government purposes. Crown Copyright 2010 Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.