Multi-criteria decision analysis to redesign an Italian Clinical Engineering Service under specific needs and regulation requirements

Abstract

The aim of this study is to fulfill the need of reengineering the Clinical Engineering Service in an Italian ASL (Local Health Authority) located in Sardinia, in accordance with the Italian regulations for healthcare.

Even if methods for processes redesigning in healthcare organizations are available in the literature, there are no recent evidences of their application in Clinical Engineering Services.

Among the multi-criteria techniques, in this work PAPRIKA was used, since it is an easy-to-use and intuitive method for multi- criteria decision making, based on decision-makers’ preferences.

We identified the decision makers’ criteria to be fulfilled and four different preference levels for each criterion, as inputs of the method. Moreover four different scenarios were identified and, for each scenario and criterion, the decision makers selected the most suitable level. In order to reduce the number of pairwise comparisons among the preference levels associated to the identified criteria, the online software 1000minds, implementing the PAPRIKA method, was used.

After 460 steps, the software allowed to rank the four possible scenarios. The application of the method allowed choosing the best solution for the ASL and it represents a good way for decision making, even though the number of questions is still high.