Application of decision making and fuzzy sets theory to evaluate the healthcare and medical problems: a review of three decades of research with recent developments

Abstract

Decision making techniques have been widely used in healthcare and medical industry. This study systematically reviews the conventional and fuzzy decision-making techniques applied in healthcare and medical problems. In total, we evaluated 202 published studies selected from 85 high-ranking journals, in which 130 of those published studies were directly related to the decision-making processes in healthcare and medical issues. Selected studies were classified into nine application areas: environmental sustainability, waste management, service quality, risk management, medical equipment and material selection, health technology, operation researches in healthcare, hospital healthcare services and other application areas. Furthermore, we classified the selected studies by numerous significant perspectives such as the authors, application areas, utilized techniques, publication time periods, decision-making and study goals, and significant results of the papers. The statistical results show that the year 2012 was ranked first in terms of developed studies within the period of 1989–2018. The techniques of AHP and hybrid approaches were the most frequently implemented decision-making technique in healthcare fields. Notably, the results also show that decision-making approaches and techniques are mostly applied to evaluate and rank different applications of service quality in healthcare and medical industries.