Identification of Key Performance Indicators for Hospital Management Using an Extended Hesitant Linguistic DEMATEL Approach

Performance analysis is of great significance to increase the operational efficiency of healthcare organizations. Healthcare performance is influenced by numerous indicators, but it is unrealistic for administrators to improve all of them due to the restriction of resources. To solve this problem, we integrated double hierarchy hesitant fuzzy linguistic term sets (DHHFLTSs) with the decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) and proposed a DHHFL– DEMATEL method to identify key performance indicators (KPIs) in healthcare management. For the developed approach, the judgments of experts on the inter-relationships among indicators were represented by DHHFLTSs, and a novel combination weighting approach was proposed to obtain experts’ weights in line with hesitant degree and consensus degree. Then, the normal DEMATEL method was extended and used for examining the cause and effect relationships between indicators; the technique for the order of preference by similarity to the ideal solution (TOPSIS) method was utilized to generate the ranking of performance indicators. Finally, the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed DHHFL–DEMATEL approach were illustrated by a practical example in a rehabilitation hospital.