Specialization of hospital services in Québec: an application of the PROMETHEE and GAIA methods

The determination of specialization degrees for hospitals has been considered by the Coordinating Office of an administrative region of Quebec, Canada. It soon appeared that several points of view had to be considered and that the use of a multicriteria decision aid method was well-adapted to this problem. In this paper, we relate how the PROMETHEE and GAIA methods were used. We first describe how the historical data were obtained and how the different criteria were defined. The application of the PROMETHEE methodology is then discussed: we summarize how preference functions and weights were selected for the criteria and how real-world decision makers accepted the method. The results obtained with PROMETHEE are compared with the graphical representation constructed by the GAIA method. Some advantages of this second approach are discussed.