تجزیه و تحلیل استراتژیک کیفیت خدمات درمانی با استفاده از روش AHP فازی

Managers in the service sector are under pressure to demonstrate that their services are customer-focused and that continuous performance improvement is being delivered. It is essential that customer expectations are properly understood and measured under the constraints that organizations must manage. The majority of the work to date has attempted to use the SERVQUAL (service quality) methodology in an effort to measure service quality. In this study, firstly the concept and factors of service quality are examined. Then a fuzzy AHP (analytic hierarchy process) is structured to evaluate the proposed service quality framework. A case study in healthcare sector in Turkey is presented to clarify the methodology.

In daily life, we are getting service in healthcare, education, finance, management, insurance, banking, retailing, consultancy, repairing and maintenance, communication, transportation (highway, seaway, airway and railway), restaurant, etc. areas every day. Some of them are introduced to us as service, some as product and some as mixing of both service and product. Its production may depend on either a physical product or not (Kotler, 2000). Nowadays in most of the developed countries, service sector has a considerable portion in employment and this portion is increasing day by day. This increase is also accepted as a sign of being full-grown and the high quality of the life standards. In addition, service sectors are the main condition of the economy. As a result, without service sector, development of other sectors is not probable. Also competition is very considerable at the global world where the main purpose is the free circulation of the merchandises/services. It is very important to get the whip hand of competition by providing the congruity of the services to the expectations of consumers. By the meaning, the qualities of the services should be measured. For this reason in this study, service and the accompanying service quality are chosen to research and analyze. There are lots of ways to measure the service quality as statistical methods, benchmarking, servperf, etc. but the SERVQUAL (service quality) methodology (Brown et al., 1993, Cronin and Taylor, 1992 and Parasuraman et al., 1985) is chosen in this study because it is the most used and preferred methodology. Also companies realized that with the similarity of products and services, service quality will be the key role for success in differentiating the products/services. Therefore, to measure and enhance the service quality become vital in recent times. In addition, service quality of healthcare sector is fairly variable. Healthcare quality is important because human health is in subject and it is crucial to provide healthcare service that meets or exceeds patients’ expectations. Also that gives us the reason to choose this sector for implementation in such an increasing populated and developing country as Turkey. The aim of this study is to determine the main healthcare service quality factors and by using these factors to measure and evaluate hospital performances. Since service industry contains intangibility, inseparability and heterogeneity, it makes people more difficult to measure service quality. Since the evaluation is resulted from evaluator’s view of linguistic variables, it must be conducted in an uncertain, fuzzy environment. In order to overcome the issue, fuzzy set theory is invited into the measurement of performance. Fuzzy set theory aids in measuring the ambiguity of concepts that are associated with human being’s subjective judgment. Nowadays, the fuzzy set theory (Zadeh, 1965) has been applied to many fields of management science, like decision making (Hsu et al., 2007, Huang et al., 2008, Kahraman et al., 2007 and Liu and Lai, 2009) however, it is scarcely used in the field of service quality (Bilsel et al., 2006, Tsaur et al., 2002, Tseng, 2009a and Tseng, 2009b). Also, there is a need for an effective tool in identifying and prioritizing relevant criteria to develop a systematic service quality measurement process. The approach should also develop consensus decision making. Thus, AHP (analytic hierarchy process), a MCDM (multiple criteria decision making) theory proposed by Saaty (1980), is applied in the service quality measurement process. The summary view of this research can be seen in Fig. 1.Through the aims given above, in the rest of this study, (1) First the conceptualization of service quality delivery in the literature, including the major criteria that consumers use to evaluate service quality is discussed. (2) Next, the way that academic and practitioner researchers have measured service quality is described. (3) After by researching and analyzing all the models and dimensions, a new multiple-item scale for measuring service quality for healthcare sector is developed, and the model is measured in sector by the aid of a MCDM technique. (4) Finally, results are evaluated and the study is concluded with focusing on the research that is needed to learn more about it.

The aim of this study was to develop a model that can evaluate the perceived service quality in healthcare sector and evaluate the performances of the some pioneer Turkish hospitals by implementation of the study’s quality factors. So in the light of this aim, data are collected from five specialized doctors in Turkey and used in the model to measure the relative healthcare performance of the alternative hospitals. The results showed that hospitals should focus more on empathy, professionalism and reliability to perform satisfying and qualified service. The findings of this study provide managers with valuable insights into the dimensions that reflect customers’ healthcare service quality perceptions. By addressing their individual weaknesses, hospitals can increase their service qualities to provide better service to patients/customers. The proposed model was evaluated by fuzzy AHP. There can be other methods to use in evaluation of healthcare service quality. These are multi-attribute evaluation methods such as analytic network process (Saaty, 1996), and technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (Hwang & Yoon, 1981). These methods have been recently developed to use in a fuzzy environment. Further research may be the application of these methods to the service quality performance problem and the comparison of the results.