A rough strength relational DEMATEL model for analysing the key success factors of hospital service quality

Successful management of hospital service quality (HSQ) is increasingly becoming strategic perspective of hospitals to excel in medical care within reasonable prices which is among the customers’/patients’ primary needs. Several key success factors (KSFs) can control the proper HSQ management and make it a complex problem. For these reasons, it is vital to set hospitals’ goals and detect KSFs via customers’ feedback and viewpoints. The preceding researches discussed not much about the effect of internal strength impact on the interdependencies between KSFs of HSQ management. To resolve these issues, a rough strength relational- decision making and trial evaluation laboratory (RSR-DEMATEL) model is developed to analyse the individual priorities of KSF of hospital’s performance measures. The RSR-DEMATEL method reflects completely the internal as well as external total influences between the KSFs. Additionally, the proposed model has intelligence and flexibility in manipulating the inherent uncertainty due to the subjective ang vague information in KSF analysis for managing HSQ. The validity and efficiency of the RSR-DEMATEL model are examined by applying it to a hospital data available in the literature. The result analysis shows that “medical staff with professional abilities” (KSF5) is the most significant KSF in HSQ management, i.e., recruiting more skilled doctors and nurses will eventually increase the performance of hospital medical services. Finally, a comparative analysis is conducted to cross check the obtained results with other two methods from literature.