The evaluation model of a country's health care system based on AHP and entropy weight method

摘要

A fair and reasonable evaluation method of a country's health care system (HCS) is necessary. With the data provided by World Health Organization (WHO), analytic hierarchy process (AHP) was applied to establish an AHP structure including 4 modules and 13 metrics. Then, the weight of every metric was obtained by using the entropy weight method. Following the basic model, a deeper analysis was done to make the evaluation simpler and more feasible. A new model named projection pursuit principal components analysis (PPPCA) was developed to select the most important and viable metrics. Using the genetic algorithm, five major metrics including health life expectancy at birth, birth attended by midwives, nurse density, expenditure shared by social security and alcohol consumption were screened out. Next, 105 countries' HCSs were evaluated with the 5 metrics and 13 metrics got in previous model respectively. The rankings got with the two methods were almost the same. Applying our models, two pairs of countries were compared. The results showed that Japan has a more effective HCS than the United States and the United States is better than India. Finally, by computer simulations to the HCS of the United States, several practical measures were provided to improve the overall quality of the system.