A fuzzy TOPSIS approach for medical provider selection and evaluation

The development of health tourism nowadays has significantly increased. Medical tourism resources are not just about medical providers, but also related to accommodations, attractions or tourism activities, transportation, and restaurants that are available at the location of the medical provider. Therefore, customers need a methodology to help them determine the destination of their healthcare (medical providers) based on a set of factors. This paper proposes a fuzzy TOPSIS approach to support the medical provider selection and evaluation process. The proposed model manually collects the ratings of alternatives from various sources on the Internet and expresses the importance weights of the criteria for medical providers in linguistic terms. We then derive the positive and negative ideal solutions based on the normalized weighted ratings. Next, the closeness coefficients are defined to determine the ranking order of alternatives. Finally, we apply the proposed model to a medical provider evaluation and selection problem involving patients from New York in order to demonstrate its applicability and computational process.