Application of soft operations research methods in healthcare: A systematic review

The purpose of this systematic review is to identify and categorize the application of soft operations research methods in healthcare settings. A systematic review was conducted to identify published papers on the application of soft operations research methods in the healthcare setting, using Google Scholar, Scopus, PubMed, Emerald, Elsevier, Web of Science, and ProQuest databases through December 2021. A total of 69 papers met our selection criteria for the systematic review. Soft operations research methods were used in a wide range of healthcare fields, including healthcare management, health informatics, e-health, and medical education, for identifying requirements, problem-solving, system design and implementation, process improvement, policymaking, knowledge management, and managing resilience, and marketing. This study contained restrictions on access to the full text of some articles and dissertations that had little impact on the study’s quality. The present study demonstrates the use of soft operations research methods in various areas of the healthcare system to better understand problematical situations. This paper can help to use soft operations research methods further in the healthcare problems, especially in the design and implementation of e-health and emerging new technology.