A Fuzzy Logic Approach to evaluate Health Care Liability and Risk of Medical Malpractice

One of the main problem that all the Healthcare systems have been called to handle in the last decades is how transposing to health structures the rules and concepts that usually supervise the productive system and companies, such as the typical form of control and responsibility. Despite the efforts in terms of standardization and control of health care activity, what Health structures and Insurance Companies still look to miss is a well and commonly defined concept of risk in a medical environment, probably due to the presence of quantitative as well qualitative significant aspects.What follows is a bad modelling of the complex nature of the problem, unable to provide meaningful results to describe health outcome and medical practice riskness by the usage of simple score cards dealing with the quantitative aspects only.The aim of this paper is providing an original alternative solution based on a fuzzy inference system to better define and study the imprecise nature who links qualitative and quantitative variables of the subject, in order to evaluate and rank the risk of error connected to health practice (Malpractice).The same technology, here implemented to evaluate a risk index concerning organisational and activity figures of a single ward of an hospital, could probably find useful application if extended to the whole health structure or to monitor in progress the riskness of the single treatment procedure, through the combined analysis of structural data and clinical figures of the patient.