Improving Hospital Based Medical Procurement Decisions with Health Technology Assessment and Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis.

Abstract

This research proposes a new medical procurement decision-making tool named Evaluation of Medical Technology Procurement (EMTP), which combines Mini-health Technology Assessment (Mini HTA) with the analytic hierarchy process (AHP), as well as the intuitionistic linguistic multi-criteria group decision model for multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA). This tool was applied to a medical device procurement decision in a large provincial general hospital with more than 5000 beds in China as a case study. Specifically, the AHP evaluation framework is first established to determine the evaluation dimensions and criteria. This goal is achieved by applying the AdHopHTA Mini-HTA template and gathering data from questionnaires completed by experts from 33 major public hospitals in Anhui Province, China. The professionals within the application hospital were invited to evaluate the alternative products in a pairwise comparison and obtain a ranking of their advantages and disadvantages. This goal is achieved using the intuitionistic linguistic fuzzy model to deal with the subjectivity and uncertainty that may be present in the professional evaluation by experts in different fields. At the same time, the Keeney-Raiffa MCDA (KRM) method was used to demonstrate the accuracy of the application results. The results show that our tool can achieve the same effect as the verification method while being more efficient, easier to use, and requiring fewer participants. The advantages and disadvantages of several evaluation methods combined with multi-criteria methods are discussed, including verification methods, pointing out the advantages and limitations of this research tool as well as the prospects for the future.