Business & Management Studies

Abstract

Today, the significance of medical equipment in health and safety of communities cannot be exaggerated. So, all countries need to consider its optimal management because of its significant effect on their development from the perspective of healthcare economics, medical education, and research. In the meantime, annually a significant amount of medical equipment loses its efficiency due to aging, failure, high maintenance costs, and other factors so that it will be unavoidable to replace the equipment effectively. In this regard, given the critical role of the equipment, it is imperative to formulate a strategic and macro program for medical equipment management to replace the available equipment in order to reduce the risk for patients and hospital staff as well as to ensure the availability of services. The present study addressed designing a system of medical equipment replacement using a hybrid SWOT-FANP approach. The approach intends to increase the self-confidence of decision-makers and owners of medical equipment and provide them with adequate supporting evidence and thereby, motivate the formulation of medical equipment replacement strategies selected by the SWOT matrix and with the aid of fuzzy analytic network process (FANP) for their prioritization. The teaching hospitals of a province in Iran were selected as the case study. The applied hybrid approach allows measuring the dependencies of the SWOT factors to consider them in assigning a strategic weight and weights to sub-factors and changing the prioritization of the alternative strategies.