Fuzzy approach to measuring healthcare service quality

What is it about?

Healthcare is one of the largest and fastest growing sectors in India. A large domestic market is complemented by the ever-increasing inflow of medical tourists as many Indian hospitals are shaping up as 'quality' service providers globally. Despite the fact that the Indian healthcare industry is highly fragmented with numerous healthcare centres and independent, privately run hospitals, the increased competition has placed a premium on measuring and maintaining the quality of service. This paper presents the use of the Fuzzy Multi-Attribute Decision-Making (FMADM) approach as a measure of service quality. Fuzzy set theory based on the Triangular Fuzzy Numbers (TFNs) of the attributes is demonstrated to overcome the linguistic problem of the measurement of service quality to a large extent. It also proposes a Technique for Order Performance by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS)-based Performance Index (PI) (PIHS) for the performance evaluation of hospital services. Healthcare managers may use it to monitor service quality and implement corrections to meet and exceed clients' satisfaction.

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