An information fusion FMEA method to assess the risk of healthcare waste

Abstract

Healthcare waste (HCW) management plays a vital role in the development of modern society. In HCW management, failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) is a popular method to implement risk management for improving the quality of healthcare. However, the shortcomings of the traditional FMEA method have been widely discussed in literatures. This paper proposes an information fusion FMEA method based on 2-tuple linguistic information and interval probability. The 2-tuple linguistic set theory is adopted to change the heterogeneous information into interval numbers. Meanwhile, the interval probability comparison method is applied to analyze failure modes. Finally, a case study is presented to verify the reliability and effectiveness of the proposed method by comparing different FMEA methods.

Keywords

• Healthcare waste management
• Failure mode and effect analysis
• Heterogeneous information fusion
• Interval probability