Multicriteria Models for E-Health Service Evaluation

Abstract

The use of advanced telecommunication and information technologies has been investigated for several decades as an effort in improving healthcare services. Over the last ten years, in particular, efforts have been centered on telemedicine, which has become an increasingly attractive field of research in healthcare service delivery. This chapter discusses multiple criteria evaluation of electronic healthcare (e-health) services, a branch of telemedicine, with both users’ and practitioners’ (service provider) perspectives. The proposed approach integrates several analytical decision making techniques and can be helpful in increasing the flexibility and efficiency of e-health service planning. Several different discrete alternative methods, namely AHP, Borda Count, LINMAP, and PROMETHEE are utilized to prioritize different e-health services and to evaluate preferences of both users and practitioners.