Fuzzy-Based Unified Decision-Making Technique to Evaluate Security Risks: A Healthcare Perspective

Neoteric biomedical, technological, and normative shifts have prompted care firms to establish clinical governance as a contrivance to assure high-quality service in an exceedingly intricate milieu. Web security is an epochal concern in the healthcare sector, although it has garnered scant attention since the inception of web applications. The necessity to provide adequate security for healthcare web applications (HWAs) cannot be exaggerated, as umpteen health agencies are contingent on them to carry out their operations. Every healthcare organization renders a humongous volume of data available online to practitioners, pharmacies, and patients. Researchers are continually endeavoring to ameliorate techniques to increase the security and longevity of HWAs. In this context, experts examined certain imperative security risks in HWAs to quantitatively evaluate them in the design phase and covered numerous facets of HWAs, along with their security attributes and risk factors. The authors have proposed a combined approach of fuzzy-based symmetric techniques, i.e., AHP-TOPSIS (Analytic Hierarchy Process–Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution), for the assessment of alternative HWAs, leveraging the multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) approach. Ten consecutive HWAs from local hospitals in Uttar Pradesh, India, have been taken to estimate the security risk, incorporating this methodology to evaluate the priority of weightage and the impact of security attributes. Henceforth, the findings and methodology employed in this study can assist security practitioners in identifying and prioritizing the most influential risk factors to secure HWAs and encourage them to develop revamped or novel methods.