Assessing the Sustainable Blockchain-Metaverse-IoT Platform in the Healthcare Industry: An Intelligent Decision Support Model

Healthcare services must fulfill patients' desires for secure data sharing and high accessibility. Blockchain technology, through blockchain platforms (BPs), can overcome healthcare challenges. This study develops a decision-making methodology for selecting the best BP, by integrating blockchain with IoT and Metaverse, the proposed approach ensures data integrity, quality, privacy and security, secure data sharing, and interoperability. The decision-making methodology uses the multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) methodology to handle conflicting criteria. Two MCDM methods are used in this study: CRiteria Importance Through Intercriteria Correlation (CRITIC) for weight computation, and Ranking of Alternatives with Weights of Criterion (RAWEC) for alternative ranking. To deal with uncertainty, the concept of spherical fuzzy sets (SFSs) is utilized, The RAWEC method is extended under the SFSs for the first time. The proposed methodology is applied to a healthcare case study in a new town in Egypt, considering twenty-two criteria and fifteen alternatives. The results show that the performance criterion has the highest weight, and the latency criterion has the lowest. The sensitivity analysis was conducted to show the stability of the rank. A comparative study was performed to show the effectiveness of the proposed methodology.