Healthcare service provider type selection of the medical tourists by using neutrosophic sets

Abstract

Medical tourism service offers a professional healthcare opportunity by travelling abroad with the chance of touristic and cultural activities at the destination country. Medical travelers prefer a foreign country for treatment due to long waiting periods, high costs, excessive number of patients, inadequate number of healthcare professionals and inadequate cutting-edge technological equipment at their country of residence. An assistance company (AC) is a legal requirement to support medical tourists in Turkey during the treatment period, and offers alternative healthcare service providers (HSPs) that are public hospitals, private hospitals and private clinics at the first phase of the medical tourism service. Moreover, there are specific HSPs certificated by the government, and a few number of public hospitals authenticated for medical tourism. By taking the whole above statements into consideration, HSP selection is a key decision-making point differentiating from a traditional hospital selection of a patient. Medical tourists must evaluate various criteria in order to select a proper HSP. Additionally, these decision criteria are often vague, complex, indeterminate and inconsistent information in the HSP type decision. Hence, in this study, a decision making model based on neutrosophic fuzzy sets considering HSP selection in every aspect (truthiness, indeterminacy and falsity) is suggested.