Utilizing Multi-Criteria Decision Making to Evaluate the Quality of Healthcare Services

Abstract

Today’s patients are more informed and quality-conscious than ever before, which is crucial for healthcare practitioners as they interact with people’s lives daily. One of the most important challenges facing the healthcare sector worldwide concerns how to improve the overall quality of hospital care. As a result of the highly competitive nature of the economy in which healthcare services are offered, both public and private hospitals in Saudi Arabia must have their patient satisfaction rates assessed to help consumers make more informed decisions. As a result, we used the analytical hierarchy process (AHP) model to ascertain how patients in Saudi Arabia perceive the quality of the service that is provided by hospitals. The objective of the research work is to identify criteria for enhancing healthcare services using the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) technique to model the five SERVQUAL dimensions along with 2 dimensions and 31 sub-criteria. Three healthcare service organizations were selected for the study and evaluated based on their service quality performance. The AHP-based model has been demonstrated systematically for ranking the hospitals based on the healthcare system. It is observed that hospitals should concentrate the most on reliability, tangibles, and security and the least on consistency. In addition, according to the sub-criteria, the hospitals’ primary priority should be infection prevention and hygiene, with completeness receiving the least attention. Based on a survey of dimensions and their sub-criteria, the best hospital is Abha Private Hospital, followed by AHH, and then Asir General Hospital. Therefore, this study has implications for choices on the efficient monitoring of the overall health system to improve quality service delivery that would boost patient happiness, which is the goal of creating hospitals.