Hospital performance evaluation by a hesitant fuzzy linguistic best worst method with inconsistency repairing

Abstract Hospital performance evaluation, as an important issue in hospital management, helps to know the status of a hospital and it can be implemented based on different criteria. Considering the cognitive complex information existed in the hospital evaluation process, this paper aims to propose a multiple criteria decision-making method with hesitant fuzzy linguistic information based on the original best worst method (BWM). As a recently developed multiple criteria decision-making method, the BWM shows better performance than the analytic hierarchy process in reducing the times of pairwise comparisons and maintaining the consistency between evaluation values. In this study, the procedure of the hesitant fuzzy linguistic BWM is proposed in stepwise to derive the weights of criteria and the priorities of alternatives. Furthermore, the cognitive preference information in the form of hesitation fuzzy linguistic term sets can express the qualitative preferences of decision-makers flexibly, and it aligns people's cognitions much closer than traditional linguistic representation models. In the case that the pairwise comparisons are with low consistency, we develop a novel inconsistency repairing method. A case study concerning the hospital performance evaluation is implemented by the proposed hesitant fuzzy linguistic BWM to illustrate the practicality and validity of the proposed method. Finally, comparative analyses are provided to justify the advantages of the proposed method.