On evaluating the efficiency of similar therapeutic-effect drugs using multi-criteria decision-making approaches selection result

Pharmaceutical industry has been invested tremendous efforts in the research and development to present new listing-drugs with more therapeutic effect and lower side-effects over years. However, those new listing-drugs are usually more expensive than previously developed drugs. In order to balance the trade-off between medical quality and cost reduction, hospitals have to keep making critical decisions on choosing a best combination of similar therapeutic effect drugs. This study aims to develop effective approaches for the efficiency evaluation of drugs. Since it is a multi-criteria decision-making problem, we first screen the critical factors and dichotomize them into two categories, the quantitative indicators and the qualitative indicators. The quantitative indicators include “daily drug expenses”, “drug profits”, “consumption of quantity”, “side-effects”, etc. The qualitative indicators include “production quality”, “physician preference”, “special drug formulation or design”, etc. We proposed to evaluate the quantitative indicators and the qualitative indicators by data envelopment analysis and analytic hierarchy process, respectively. The proposed approaches are able to acquire a ranking of the efficiency of similar therapeutic-effect drugs. Following our case study, we conclude that the proposed approaches may serve as more objective and effective decision-support tools for the decision-makers who have to decide the ranking of similar therapeutic-effect drugs.