Development of a Collaborative Decision-Making Framework to Improve the Patients’ Service Quality in the Intensive Care Unit During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

Healthcare is one of the biggest and complex service sectors, where decisions need to be made quickly, accurately and efficiently including multiple stake-holders. Especially during this COVID-19 pandemic, service improvement decisions in Intensive Care Units (ICU) are considered to be a critical factor. Many implemented solutions in the healthcare sector become unsustainable in the long term due to a lack of consensus among the stake-holders. In this thesis, a collaborative decision-making framework is developed to improve the Patients’ Service Quality in the ICU including multiple stake-holders. The key criteria, alternatives that can advance the service quality in the ICU are identified from in-depth literature review. In this research work, the best-worst method (BWM) is integrated with Multi-Actor Multi-Criteria Analysis (MAMCA) method to capture the stake-holder’s opinion and preference value. Based on criteria weight and preference value the best-ranked alternative for each stake-holder is determined. However, to find out the consensus solution a Multi-Objective Linear Programming (MOLP) is integrated with BWM-MAMCA methods. The MOLP considers every criterion as an objective function including all stake-holder’s criteria to find a consensus solution. Two scenarios are considered in this research work, scenario 1 considers all selected criteria under each stake-holder, whereas in scenario 2, every stake-holder selects their preferred set of criteria based on their work background. Both scenarios’ results suggest that alternative A1 (Hiring Part-time physicians and medical staff) is the best consensus solution to improve the patients’ service quality in the ICU by satisfying every stake-holder’s requirement. The developed integrated framework even allows stake-holder groups (multiple participants under each stake-holder group) to participate in the group decision-making process to select an effective strategy that can improve the patients’ service quality.