Ubiquitous Multicriteria Clinic Recommendation System

Area of Science:

• Health Informatics
• Decision Support Systems
• Mobile Health (mHealth)

Background:

• Patient preferences for healthcare access often involve proximity, minimal waiting times, and specific provider choices.
• Existing clinic recommendation methods may not adequately address these diverse patient needs and preferences.
• Technological advancements in information, communication, and sensors enable new approaches to personalized healthcare services.

Purpose of the Study:

• To propose a ubiquitous multicriteria clinic recommendation system for mobile devices.
• To enable patients to compare and select clinics based on multiple criteria.
• To enhance patient satisfaction and healthcare accessibility through personalized recommendations.

Main Methods:

• Patients submit requests via cell phones to a central system server.
• The system estimates patient speed using Global Positioning System (GPS) data.
• A fuzzy integer nonlinear programming-ordered weighted average approach assesses four criteria for clinic utility.

Main Results:

• The proposed system successfully recommends clinics based on estimated patient speed and multiple criteria.
• Field experiments demonstrated the system's advantage over two existing recommendation methods.
• The improvement in recommendation utility provided by the new system was statistically significant.

Conclusions:

• The developed multicriteria clinic recommendation system effectively enhances the utility of healthcare choices for patients.
• Ubiquitous mobile systems can significantly improve personalized healthcare access and decision-making.
• This approach offers a valuable tool for optimizing patient-clinic matching in real-time.