Hospital selection under Insured Public Health Schemes in the multi-criteria group decision-making environment

Abstract

A thriving healthcare system perfectly reflects economic development and contentment amongst the people of any region. With increasing anxiety concering health and growing medical needs, hospitals worldwide face substantial challenge to provide patients with adequate medical facilities under one roof. With a fragile state of the health industry in a developing country like India, there is a need for the hospitals to opt for international standards and comply with other premier health centers of the country. This paper aims to select the hospitals based on incongruous and conflicting criteria involving group decision-making using the Intuitionistic Fuzzy (IF) and Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) method. The criteria used are concomitant to an insured public health scheme named Ayushman Bharat-National Health Protection Scheme (AB-NHPS) of the Government of India. For each alternative Euclidean distance has been used to calculate the positive and negative separation measure from the ideal solution. The relative closeness to the ideal solution has been used to rank the hospitals. The result is a list of hospitals ranked from best to worst based on the laid criteria. It can aid governing bodies in decision-making under an uncertain environment with multiple complex criteria to analyze.