Abstract:   Hospitals are very vital as an element in Quality Care delivery and their evaluation in these terms on a perpetual basis is much needed as these organizations contribute to improving health outcomes for general people. Hospitals, especially privately owned, are also run like businesses these days to remain competitive in the respective arena. The environment and situation faced by many hospitals are often complicated and require insightful solutions to steer the direction of these businesses. This study was focused on the application of group decision-making tool, DEMATEL as one of the valid methods in Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM). The study was exploratory and efforts were made to justify by highlighting the criteria prioritization procedure to be undertaken by any healthcare organization. A slight deviation from the standard four-steps of DEMATEL, a course of action was created in the shape of an eight-step procedure to exhibit a practical approach rather than a mathematical theory approach. To make it more empirical, a five-stage research framework was also devised and acted upon with the help of three separate questionnaires. Avedis Donabedian (1988) Quality Care framework was followed and multiple variables were devised, importance ratings were collected from patients on these devised variables and after reduction of variables into manageable latent factors, called criteria in the study, the DEMATEL method was applied to depict the prioritization of Quality Care criteria for the delivery of quality service via digraph. The graphical representation through digraph showed that criteria were vertically divided into two halves as C1, C5, and C4 are shown as criteria influencing the lower half criteria C3, C6, and C2. The horizontal span of the digraph reflected the importance of criteria prioritized and showed the C1 criterion as the most important and the C2 criterion with the least importance. The prioritization of the criteria along with their cause and effect distribution gave an insight into the constitutional framework of localized healthcare services of Karachi, Pakistan.

Keywords:   Quality Care, DEMATEL, Quality Service, MCDM

Publisher:   ILMA UNIVERSITY

Published:   7 December 2015

Issue:   Issue 2 : Volume 11

E-ISSN:   2409-6520

P-ISSN:   2414-8393