Evaluating competitive advantage of the location for Taiwanese hospitals

This study identifies important optimal location attributes and factors influencing the evaluation model to select the optimal location. Increased living standards in Taiwan in recent years have made Taiwanese residents more health conscious and increasingly concerned with quality healthcare, explaining the heightened consumer demand for quality and scope of medical services. In such an intensely competitive environment, selecting the optimal location of hospitals to be established is of priority concern. Adopted herein is the renowned diamond model introduced in Porter's The Competitive Advantage of Nations that influences how competitive advantages, especially with respect to developing and evaluating the objectives of optimal location selection, are related in order to devise a standardized operational procedure. Therefore, this work presents an AHP-based evaluation model for fuzzy prioritization; the proposed model incorporates the fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP) to determine the evaluation weights. Finally, then performed to select the optimal location of a regional hospital in Taiwan to determine the effectiveness of the proposed evaluation model. The proposed evaluation criterion provides a valuable reference for hospital administrators and academics in establishing a standardized means of selecting the optimal location for new medical care facilities.