Evaluating the blockchain-based healthcare supply chain using interval-valued Pythagorean fuzzy entropy-based decision support system

Abstract

In the current era, blockchain technology has emerged as a novel technique to maintain the operations of healthcare management systems. The global COVID-19 disease has led to increase in the utilization of technology for healthcare supply chain, patient data management, and claims settlement. Data management in healthcare industry is a complex procedure where multiple organizations offer appropriate supply chain facilities in everyday life. Inadequate data handling disrupts the supply chain, which has a longstanding impact on the healthcare region. Blockchain-based solutions are renowned for their ability to produce safe and traceable results and effective in the health sector for secure data retrieval and storage, resulting in more effectual product creation and tracking. These technologies can deliver data provenance, sponsors candid healthcare industry demands, and certifies the immutability of multi direction transactions. Due to involvement of multiple factors/criteria, the selection of an effective blockchain platform-based healthcare supply chain can be treated as a decision support system (DSS) problem. Thus, the objective of this paper is to present a novel interval-valued Pythagorean fuzzy DSS for evaluating the blockchain platforms for healthcare supply chain and selecting a suitable one with respect to multiple criteria and uncertainty. The proposed DSS framework is divided into three stages. First, some fairly aggregation operators are presented to combine the individual’s information and also discussed their desirable characteristics on interval-valued Pythagorean fuzzy sets (IVPFSs). Second, an integrated weighting tool is developed using entropy-based tool for objective weight of criteria and pivot pairwise relative criteria importance assessment (PIPRECIA) model for subjective weight of criteria with IVPFSs. For this purpose, new entropy is presented on IVPFSs. Third, the multi-attribute ideal-real comparative analysis (MAIRCA) model is developed with the combination of fairly aggregation operators, entropy-based weighting tool and PIPRECIA model with interval-valued Pythagorean fuzzy information. Further, the proposed DSS is used on a case study of blockchain platforms for healthcare supply chain evaluation, which confirms its applicability and usefulness. Sensitivity and comparative assessments are carried out to check the consistency, robustness and efficiency of the presented method.