Healthcare Failure Mode and Effects Analysis Under Fuzziness

Failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA) is a step-by-step approach for identifying all possible failures in a design, a manufacturing or assembly process, or a product or service. The purpose of the FMEA is to take actions to eliminate or reduce failures, starting with the highest-priority ones. This article presents a basis for prioritizing the healthcare problems using FMEA with linguistic variables and fuzzy if-then rules. Severity rating of healthcare problems is handled under the categories of catastrophic, major, moderate, and minor events. MATLAB 2007 is used to obtain the results of fuzzy if-then rules for prioritizing healthcare failures. A numerical example is given for four possible healthcare problems to be prioritized, which are wrong patient, delay in therapy, wrong analgesic selection, and wrong drug.