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.