Fuzzy Multicriteria Modelling of Decision Making in the Renewal of Healthcare Technologies

Abstract

In the current literature, there are a clear lack of systems to assist in making decisions about the renewal of technology for healthcare equipment, which means that the limited capacity to invest in new equipment cannot usually be appropriately applied as determined by the care requirements of a community. This may have important repercussions for patients, such as the inability to offer treatment or diagnosis, having to delay treatment or diagnosis, increase the risk of patients and care staff of using obsolete equipment, and preventing early, accurate, and reliable diagnosis, all of which have effects on the quality of care to a community. This study therefore describes the first multicriteria model in a fuzzy environment to assist in decision making related to the renewal of healthcare equipment. The fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP), which allows for ambiguities, uncertainties, and doubts inherent in real-world decision processes to be taken into account, was used to do this. The model produces a plan with actions to be taken depending on the obtained results. The model includes a novel methodology that consists of modifying the top–down technique to allow for the levels of priority for renewing healthcare equipment to be determined from judgements given by three experts. The model was validated by applying it to a set of medical devices, and we show the results for a surgical C-arm, an X-ray CT room, a neonatal ventilator, a defibrillator, and a video-colonoscope. A program was also created using the NI Labview software to process the model so that it could be applied with a user interface that acts quickly, simply, and intuitively.