Combined medical quality assessment using the evidential reasoning approach

• A multiple criteria medical quality assessment framework is proposed.
• The evidential reasoning approach is applied to combined medical quality assessment.
• A method for converting numerical indicators to qualitative grades is proposed.
• A case study of the quality assessment framework and methodology is presented.

Due to increasing demand for healthcare, medical quality has attracted significant attention in recent years. Most studies to date have tried to assess medical quality from objective quality indicators or subjective expert judgments or patient feedback perspective. In this study, the evidential reasoning approach is employed to combine objective quality indicators, subjective expert judgments and patient feedback in a multiple criteria framework to assess the quality of hospitals systematically and comprehensively. The evidential reasoning approach has the advantages of consistently handling both subjective evaluations and objective indicators under uncertainty within the same framework, and it can help to provide a robust alternative ranking. This study contributes to the literature with not only a novel medical quality assessment and aggregation framework, but also a pragmatic data transformation technique which can facilitate the combination of quantitative data and qualitative judgments using the evidential reasoning approach. A case study of three top-ranked teaching hospitals in Beijing is presented to demonstrate the framework and methodology proposed in this study.