Implementation of remotely monitored medical dialysis units: dealing with multiple criteria and multiple decision makers

International audience; The new information and communication technologies represent useful tools for improving the health system. Decisions on their implementation and use must be based on solid observations to assess their impacts on care and health. The difficult use of classical economic evaluation methods is due to the multidimensionality of the assessment of telemedicine implementations. Indeed, to evaluate the impact of the introduction of telemedicine, it is necessary to take into account various indicators identified in the literature, as cost, accessibility, acceptability and quality. Furthermore, they need to be considered with respect to all the stakeholders involved in the decision process (physicists, patients and hospital director). In this context, decision support theories provide additional insight into the evaluation of telemedicine.The aim of this paper is to present a multicriteria evaluation methodology involving multiple decision makers for the establishment of remotely monitored medical dialysis solutions.To reach a decision, the hospital director wishes to take into account, next to the above mentionned indicators, the preferences of the physicians and the dialysis patients. In order to explicit these preferences, we suggest to consider that the patients and the physicians are decision makers which have to express a ranking of care modalities evaluated on multiple criteria. We thus face a situation involving multiple judges which overlay a multiplicity of viewpoints. To solve this problem, we use techniques both from social choice theory and multicriteria decision analysis. First we propose to agregate the individual rankings of the patients on the potential multicriteria care modalities into a patient-wide order (via the Borda count and Copeland's pairwise aggregation), which is then used in the multicriteria preference elicitation phasis of the physicians. The individual rankings of the latter ones is then aggregated into a physician-wide ranking which is then combined with the patients' one and further economical criteria to elicit the hospital director's preferences on the care modalities. This methodology is applied to the implementation of medical dialysis units in Brittany (France), on basis of the preferences of 16 patients, 8 physicians and 1 hospital director.The preferences of all the stakeholders of this decision process are representable by additive value models. The preferred alternative among the patients and the physicians is the medical dialysis unit with remote monitoring. The criterion which has the highest impact on the patients' (resp. physicians') decision is the distance to the dialysis unit (resp. the patients' satisfaction). Finally, the analysis shows that the most important criteria for the hospital director are the physicians' and the patients' satisfaction (which are generally not considered).This work shows that it is important to consider the heterogeneity and the multiplicity of viewpoints and actors in the evaluation of the implementation of remotely monitored medical dialysis solutions via multicriteria decision support techniques. We believe that this approach is an important stepping stone in the evaluation of telemedecine.