A large-scale group decision making method to select the ideal mobile health application for the hospital

Mobile health, which is not limited by time and space, can effectively alleviate the imbalance of medical resources. Currently, more and more hospitals begin to pay attention to online medical care and actively expand their mobile channels. Among of which, the cooperation with the third-party platform is an effective way to expand the online services of most hospitals. With the increasing number of mobile health applications (mHealth apps), it is difficult to select the ideal application. Most of the existing studies on mHealth app selection are conducted from the perspective of users who have health needs, which is insufficient. The views of multiple stakeholders should be taken into account. mHealth app selection can be regarded as a large-scale group decision making (LSGDM) problem. In this paper, a hybrid LSGDM method is proposed to select the mHealth app with the highest user satisfaction. First, the weights of criteria are obtained based on quality function deployment and 2-additive measure. Furthermore, a consensus model that considers cooperative and non-cooperative behaviors of decision makers is applied to select the ideal mHealth app. Finally, an illustrative example is implemented to exhibit the utility and validity of the proposed model.