Evaluation and Selection of Most Preferable Supplementary Blood Centers in The Case of Tehran

Background: The efficiency of health system services is a critical measure for societies development. During the last fifty years, the world has witnessed a massive increase in health expenditure, and health-related cost, especially in developing countries, is the main obstacle in the way of advance in health care systems. As a remarkable portion of this cost belongs to blood supply chains, almost any improvement in performance is considered as a critical part of health systems, which contributes to modifying cost-savings and responsiveness policies. Method: In this paper, a novel multi-criteria decision-making technique is conceptually proposed and presented to location supplementary blood centers so as to prevent disruption to a large extent. In this respect, Grey theory and TOPSIS, a distance-based multiple criteria method, are employed to integrate and evaluate the alternative performance for selecting supplementary blood centers. From a research perspective, TOPSIS method is improved to more effectively tackle grey numbers by presenting a degree of likelihood instead of converting grey numbers into crisp numbers functions, that provides the more flexible ranking procedure.Results: The real data from Tehran blood transfusion center is applied to validate the method and provide insight into its operational execution, obtained results and validity. Overall, this paper found the proposed hybridized methodology to provide relatively consistent results of top-performing alternatives comparing with the more complicated and less intuitively appealing grey-rough set theory approach. Conclusion: The proposed hybrid methodology is a useful tool for managers, as well as researchers, who seek to evaluate alternative performance in various studies related to multi-criteria decision making. The technique can also be applied in a regular spreadsheet situation, can take into consideration a variety of metrics, both tangible and intangible, and can be devised with a minimal outside effort from decision-makers and be based completely on archival data if necessary.