Multi-criteria decision analysis and its application in health management: a proposal for a systematic review of the literature

Abstract

This paper presents a systematic literature review on the use of multicriteria decision analysis methods in the field of health. In this sense, making use of bibliometric techniques, we identified health management areas in which multi-criteria methods have been applied; the multi-criteria methods employed; the countries where these studies were carried out; the most cited authors; the number of papers published per year; and the most used key words. Among the findings, we found that the analytic hierarchy process is the most often employed multi-criteria method. In addition, we discovered that information technology in health care management is the most prominent area of application.