Integrating hierarchical balanced scorecard with fuzzy linguistic for evaluating operating room performance in hospitals

Health care organizations are operating in a complex environment. The competitive and dynamic health care sector has spurred hospitals into delivering greater flexibility and quality of services. An efficient performance evaluation system is essential for controlling, monitoring and improving service quality in health care organizations. The performance evaluation of operating room (OR) is a useful work for managers to control the operational process of OR team so as to promote the performance. This paper explores the use of a management tool: balanced scorecard (BSC), which facilitates managers to meet multiple strategic goals, and fuzzy linguistic method for evaluating OR performance. BSC is a strategic planning and management system that is used extensively in business and industry, government and nonprofit organizations. First, a model is developed for measuring the acceptable performance of OR based on the interaction financial, customers, internal business process and learning and growth perspective. After that, BSC structure integrated with fuzzy linguistic is proposed for measuring and improving the service. The aim of this study was to build a performance evaluation system for OR and use a fuzzy linguistic to convert the subjective cognition of managers into an information entity and confirmation of improvement. This research results are able to help the organisation to evaluate and revise its strategy and generally to adopt modern management approaches in every day practise. 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.