AHP model for quality evaluation of healthcare system

Abstract

The issue of healthcare quality is continuously analysed worldwide, as it is a costly investment which takes significant part of country budgets. The EU wide healthcare costs have already overcome €1,400 billion/year, and have a faster raising trend comparing to the GDP levels of member countries. The variety of models, abundance of indicators and inconsistency of statistical information used for quality evaluation in healthcare leads to numerous attempts of solving this task in the scientific literature. The article aims to evaluate healthcare quality by taking into account the importance of indicators by applying expert based AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process) method and the regression analysis of health statistics. The rankings of EU countries according to their healthcare investment types and costs were developed and evaluated.