Performance Evaluation of Medical Units from a Private Healthcare Network Using Multi-criteria Decision Making

Abstract

When determining the performance of medical units, it must be taken into consideration the optimization of resources and improvement of services that are offered to patients. This paper proposes an approach based on multiple-criteria decision analysis for the identification of the most performant medical unit from a private healthcare network in Romania. The study takes into consideration the conversion rate of patient visits from the hospital ambulatory into surgical interventions, considering factors such as the conversion rate for each doctor, the duration between the first visit and surgical intervention, types of medical specialities and the utilization rate of medical resources. Data comes from a clinic database, and it was processed and analyzed using a data visualisation tool. Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) was used for weighting criteria in order to correlate operational factors and clinic efficiency. The results highlight important variations between medical units, identifying medical practices which lead to the best performance in conversion rates of patients to surgical treatment. This research offers a solid decision-making framework for health managers, facilitating optimal allocation of resources and improvement operational flows. Also, the proposed methodology can be extended and applied in other fields of medical management for the evaluation of hospitals' performance. Conclusions suggest that using MCDM combined with advanced data analytics can have a significant impact on making strategic decisions with a positive outcome on the quality of patient care and overall efficiency of private medical systems.