Abstract
Telemedicine has been increasingly used in healthcare to provide services to patients remotely. However, prioritizing patients with multiple chronic diseases (MCDs) in the telemedicine environment is challenging due to the complexity of decision-making based on the different degrees of emergency of such patients. As such, this study was carried out to propose a novel technique called Technique for Reorganization of Opinion Order to Interval Levels (TROOIL) to prioritize patients with MCDs in real-time using a rermte health-monitoring system The proposed TROOIL technique comprises six steps for prioritizing MCD patients, namely the conversion of actual data into intervals, generation rule, ordering rule, expert-rule validation, data reorganization, criteria weighting, and ranking alternatives for each rule. A secondary dataset of 500 remote patients with three chronic diseases, namely chronic heart disease, high blood pressure, and low blood pressure, was adopted from the roost relevant prioritization study. The findings showed that the proposed TROOIL was able to prioritize MCD patients effectively, as those with a high degree of emergency were given top priority. For the objective validation, the comparison indicated that the first group's scores were the highest for all rules, indicating that the ranking resuhs were identical For the evaluation of all scenarios, the performance of the proposed technique exceeded that of the benchmark by 22.95%. In conclusion, the proposed TROOIL technique can effectively deal with multiple decision-making problem; in prioritizing MCD patients. As such, this novel technique can be used to help healthcare centers to provide prompt services to MCD patients based on their level of priority, to assist medical organizations to improve the priority setting processes, and to provide medical doctors with decision-making support in prioritizing their patients for timely and accurate treatments.