Joint commission international consultant selection for hospitals by fuzzy AHP

Joint Commission International (JCI) has been dedicated to improving the quality and safety of health care services. Today, the largest certification body of health care organizations in the United States, the Joint Commission surveys nearly 20,000 health care programs through a voluntary accreditation process. The Joint Commission is a none-profit organization. The JCI continuously improves the safety and quality of care in the international community through the provision of education and international accreditation. The JCI standard contains different subjects such as Prevention of Infection, Patient and Family Rights, Leadership, Facility Management, Safety. Clients do not always appreciate differences among JCI consultants. This paper aims to provide an analytical tool to select the best JCI consultant providing the most customer satisfaction. The clients of three Turkish JCI consultancy firms were interviewed and the most important criteria taken into account by the clients while they were selecting their consultancy firms were determined by a designed questionnaire. The fuzzy analytic hierarchy process was applied to compare these consultancy firms. The means of the triangular fuzzy numbers produced by the customers and experts for each comparison were successfully used in the pair wise comparison matrices.