A group decision-making approach for exploring trends in the development of the healthcare industry in Taiwan

Abstract

The increased awareness of the importance of global healthcare which has formed an inseparable relationship with the quality of human life has led researchers to pay attention to trends in the development of the healthcare industry. This study identifies eight potential development trends designed to provide the healthcare industry with appropriate development strategy recommendations. The modified Z-numbers decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (called the modified Z-DEMATEL) technique is adapted to construct the mutual influential relationships and prioritize these trends. The Z-number method optimizes the conventional fuzzy numbers and increases the reliability of expert evaluations to reflect the confidence of the evaluation environment under uncertainty. The modified Z-DEMATEL provides a complete linguistic evaluation and its membership functions, and generates a set of influence weights of the criteria. Real healthcare development trends in Taiwan are taken as an example to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model. The results show that the internet of things and telemedicine are important future trends in Taiwan. This paper provides useful and reliable management suggestions to help the healthcare industry promote innovative technologies.