Promoting the physician–patient consensus with a hesitant fuzzy linguistic consensus method based on betweenness relation

Abstract

As the relationship between physicians and patients faces increasing challenges, physician–patient relation has gradually become the common concern of the whole society. To relieve this kind of pressure, the mechanism that reaches a consensus between physicians and patients on treatment choices needs to be discussed. Considering that there always exist uncertainties during the medical treatment process, this paper aims to develop a decision-making method to address the consensus issues under a hesitant fuzzy linguistic environment. Since patients and physicians possess different backgrounds and multiple specialties, they are allowed to evaluate alternatives under the individual set of criteria. Then, a Simos–Roy–Figueira method is proposed to derive the weights of criteria with hesitant fuzzy linguistic information. The ELECTRE III method is introduced to obtain the ranking of alternatives from each decision maker’s opinions. Further, a novel consensus method based on betweenness relation is developed to address the obtained rankings. Finally, the process to determine the treatment plan for a hepatocellular carcinoma patient is solved by the proposed method. The obtained result is considered reasonable by experts involved in the consultation, which illustrates the effectiveness of the method. Then, some simulation experiments are designed to show the features of the method. The short running time of the proposed method shows its high efficiency.