An Integration of QFD and Fuzzy-AHP approach in Hospital Services, case study: a Hospital in Iran

Purpose

This paper shows a development of an integrated model to identify the customer needs and select the best solution to optimize the quality of healthcare systems, namely at hospitals.

Design/methodology/approach

After determining the patient’s requirements by data gathering from experts and patients, a questionnaire was prepared to implement the Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (FAHP) method. Afterward, the requirement’s weight has determined by the patients. Finally, the most important technical requirements were achieved applying the 3-phases Quality Function Deployment (QFD) model.

Findings

The results show that by adapting the FAHP on ideas of the patients and hospital’s experts to determine the weights of patients’ requirements, led to have more flotation in FAHP questionnaires in the hospital services. In this domain, adopting the decision-making tools help more precise ranking of patients’ requirements.

Originality/value

Since high-quality urgent services are vital to the protection of human life, it is significant to precisely rank the patient’s requirements by novel methodologies. By the implementation of an integrated model using FAHP and QFD, we were able to show the improvement of the quality of an hospital in Iran. After precisely ranking the patient requirements, “increasing human resource” and “establishing requirements and instructions in initial measures and reducing medication errors”, are obtained as the most important technical requirements.

QFD, Voice of Customer, House of Quality (HOQ), Hospital Services, FAHP