Multicriteria Decision-Making in Healthcare Systems and Applications

Multicriteria decision-making (MCDM) in healthcare addresses the inherently complex challenge of choosing among alternatives when objectives conflict and data are uncertain. Decisions range from allocating scarce resources and designing service networks to selecting treatment strategies and prioritising patients for interventions. Central to this field is the integration of clinical expertise, stakeholder preferences and quantitative indicators into coherent models. Techniques such as the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS), Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and various fuzzy-logic approaches enable decision-makers to structure problems hierarchically, assign weights to criteria and derive transparent rankings. Recent digital-health developments have further enriched MCDM applications, incorporating electronic health records, telemedicine data streams and real-time monitoring to refine prioritisation in chronic disease management, pandemic response and hospital operations. By reconciling efficiency, equity and quality objectives, MCDM frameworks have become essential tools for policy-makers, clinicians and administrators seeking evidence-based, reproducible and stakeholder-sensitive solutions across global healthcare systems.

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Multicriteria Decision-Making in Healthcare Systems and Applications publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in multicriteria decision-making in healthcare systems and applications across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Multicriteria Decision-Making (MCDM): A class of methodologies that assess, compare and rank alternatives based on several, often conflicting, criteria.

Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP): A structured decision-making technique that decomposes a problem into a hierarchy of criteria and uses pairwise comparisons to derive priority scales.

TOPSIS (Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution): A ranking method that evaluates alternatives by measuring their relative distance to an ideal best and an ideal worst solution.

Fuzzy Sets: Mathematical constructs that allow elements to belong to a set with varying degrees of membership, capturing uncertainty and vagueness in decision-making inputs.

References

1. Multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA) in health care: a systematic review of the main characteristics and methodological steps. BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making (2018).
2. Novel dynamic fuzzy Decision-Making framework for COVID-19 vaccine dose recipients. Journal of Advanced Research (2021).
3. Based on T-spherical fuzzy environment: A combination of FWZIC and FDOSM for prioritising COVID-19 vaccine dose recipients. Journal of Infection and Public Health (2021).
4. A Uniform Intelligent Prioritisation for Solving Diverse and Big Data Generated From Multiple Chronic Diseases Patients Based on Hybrid Decision-Making and Voting Method. IEEE Access (2020).