Determining a new multi-level criteria evaluation strategy for medicines suppliers

Today, in the biomedical services in hospitals, all types of medication errors including missed dose, wrong dosage forms, wrong packaging, wrong route, etc., are a big deal for better patient care. All these errors are principally related to supplier's poor services; therefore medication errors can be reduced significantly by improving suppliers' performance. To monitor these performances, an effective evaluation method is essential, and the choice of the appropriate criteria to be based in is paramount; although, when our decision problem considers several levels of criteria, the alternatives performance becomes difficult o evaluate. In this paper, we shed light on two principle points; the first one proposes a multi-level criteria strategy to evaluate suppliers based on Topsis method, while determining attributes weights by entropy approach. And the second one determines three levels of critical criteria to be based in, in the proposed evaluation process. The proposed strategy is validated through a comparison study, whose results analysis has shown the ineffectiveness of the single level criteria in the evaluation system.