A Novel Decision Making Approach for Benchmarking the Service Quality of Smart Community Health Centers

The purpose of this research is to develop a novel approach to benchmark smart community health centers in order to achieve continuous improvement of service quality. Three methods are presented: the fuzzy DEMATEL method is used to determine the criteria weights, the fuzzy ELECTRE III method is empl...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE access 2020, Vol.8, p.209904-209914
Main Authors: Li, Hao, Li, Jinlin, Dietl, Helmut
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Benchmark testing
Benchmarks
Continuous improvement
Criteria
Decision analysis
Decision making
fuzzy set theory
Health centres
Health facilities
Indigent care
quality management
Quality of service
Ranking
Smart cities
Uncertainty
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:The purpose of this research is to develop a novel approach to benchmark smart community health centers in order to achieve continuous improvement of service quality. Three methods are presented: the fuzzy DEMATEL method is used to determine the criteria weights, the fuzzy ELECTRE III method is employed to obtain the ranking of smart community health centers, and IPA (Importance-Performance Analysis) is employed to formulate improvement strategies. The proposed approach clearly identifies the strengths and weakness of each smart community health center by ranking its performance with respect to a system of five service quality criteria. In addition, IPA is able to develop the most effective improvement strategies for each smart community health center. The proposed approach was applied to five smart community health centers in Beijing and service strengths and weakness are discussed. The proposed approach has three notable advantages. First, the novel approach can address ambiguity and uncertainty in the process of decision making. Second, interdependent relationships among the evaluation criteria are analyzed by the fuzzy DEMATEL method, so that the weights obtained are more in line with reality. Third, the fuzzy ELECTRE III method considers non-compensatory behavior for service quality comparisons among smart community health centers. The novel fuzzy-based approach presented in this article is a powerful and highly effective tool to benchmark smart community health centers and develop successful improvement strategies of service quality.
ISSN:2169-3536
2169-3536
DOI:10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3037769