Evaluation of service performance with multi criteria decision making methods: An application in healthcare sector

An important part of the service sector is healthcare services. In our country, healthcare institutions are among the most rapidly developing and most invested areas. Due to the increasing healthcare investments in recent years, it has become more important to evaluate the performances of healthcare institutions. Data Envelopment Analysis is one of the most common quantitative methods used to evaluate healthcare services and measure the performance of healthcare institutions. However, quantity increase in healthcare capacity and quality increase are not fit each other. Because the quality and performance of healthcare services are mostly evaluated on quantitative measures, interpretations may remain superficial and assessments may be distant from objectivity. It is important to make objective evaluations as much as possible in the healthcare services sector and to develop medium and long term vision and strategy. In this study, three different healthcare institutions operating under the Ministry of Healthcare were evaluated with multi-criteria decision-making methods. The main theme of the study is the physician selection problem. Hospitals' performance and service quality, which is the main component of healthcare services, are the most important means of sustaining their competitive advantage. Hospital administrations have to be sensitive about this issue. Effective policies and procedures of hospitals increase customer satisfaction, while efficient operations ensure their performance. Therefore, measuring satisfaction and performance is indispensable for management. However, measurement also has difficulties. To meet these challenges, multi-criteria decision-making methods are appropriate tools. As a result, it has been tried to give a different perspective to the concept of uncertainty by using Fuzzy Complex Proportional Assesment (COPRAS-F) method which produces solutions to uncertainty problems which is the most basic problem of decision making problems.