Designing a model for healthcare services supply chain performance evaluation using neutrosophic multiple attribute decision-making technique

Healthcare services supply chain performance evaluation in hospitals that deal with society’s well-being has significant importance on their performance improvement. The purpose of this research was to evaluate healthcare services supply chain performance using a neutrosophic multiple attribute decision-making technique in Tehran’s hospitals. Comprehensive performance evaluation was conducted by applying both objective attributes that focused on the outcome along subjective attributes that were based on the judgment of evaluators. In this regard, neutrosophic logic has been deployed to face uncertainties in the expert’s judgment for determining the priority of attributes over each other explained via linguistic variables in the form of trapezoidal neutrosophic numbers. Eigenvector-power as one of the multiple attribute decision-making techniques concerned with evaluating and choosing the best option among the available ones based on diverse and conflicting attributes was used to ascertain attributes’ importance in addition to guaranteeing obtainment of the largest eigenvalue of the characteristic polynomial, has led to reduction of calculations. Neutrosophic algebraic operations embedded in the eigenvector-power technique after efficiency confirmation of the technique was acquired. In order to gap analysis, a paired t-test was exploited to discover the existence of differences between the current and desired performance of attributes. Then, attributes’ weighted performance gaps were calculated by multiplying the weight of each attribute by its performance gap which smoothed attributes’ performance gap criticality definition by applying quartiles. “Staff job satisfaction” and “response to demands” attributes were categorized as very highly critical, “treatment branding” and “proportion of service with cost” attributes were classified as highly critical, “technological comfort” and “stakeholder’s interests” attributes were grouped as moderately critical and “access” and “treatment plan fulfilment” attributes were relegated as low critical, respectively according to the weighted performance gap.