AHP for the acquisition of biomedical instrumentation

Health technology management consists of several decision processes including the acquisition of new technology. The purchasing of a new device requires the selection of one among several products taking into account different criteria. When the technology is characterized by large amount of parameters the choice becomes problematical and a support tool is needed. In 2003 Sloane et al. published a study in which they demonstrated the potentialities of the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to support the selection of a biomedical instrumentation. The work presented here describes the application of AHP to support the quality assessment for the selection of pacemakers and implantable defibrillators and shows that the method is indeed very appropriate for that task.