Human Reliability Assessment in Healthcare Operations Using Fuzzy Cognitive Maps
Yeşim Kop Naskali, Tuncay Gürbüz and Y. Esra Albayrak
Reliability is the fundamental element of safety operation of all systems. Human performance plays a significant role in the development and operation of complex systems so it is obvious that human errors have serious effects on the complex system performance. Healthcare services sector is one of the major fields that require human reliability assessment as most of the applications involve human handling, decisions and processing. This study aims to draw a complete representation of doctors’ behavior leading to clinical error by acquiring a complete causal relation model between all possible performance-influencing factors (PIFs) in healthcare operations which have been determined and analyzed for various healthcare operations.
Fuzzy Cognitive Maps (FCM) has been used to procure an explicit understanding of human behavior and all of the reasons relying under his behavior. In this respect, four doctors working in different high-risk involving healthcare fields evaluated all PIFs. The causal relationships are obtained and evaluated through a sensitivity analysis using different alpha-cuts. In real-life decisions, decision-makers may have different confidence levels on expert judgments. The sensitivity analysis procures to the decision-makers a perspective that explains how the fuzziness in judgment may affect the solution robustness.
Keywords: Human reliability assessment (HRA); healthcare; fuzzy cognitive maps (FCMs); fuzzy inference systems; fuzzy rule-based systems