Ranking the strengths of Iranian health new financial management reform with approach of experts' attitude, group hierarchical analysis and simple additive weighted model

Background: Since Ministry of Health and Medical Education was the first Iranian governmental organization which established accrual accounting as the first phase of health financial reform, this study was conducted to set the priority of this phase of reform's strengths in order to give scheme of this experience to the organizations with similar conditions which tend to establish accrual accounting. Methods: This study was performed in two separate and consecutive phases on financial and budget managers of Universities of Medical Sciences and trainers of health financial new system in these universities in order to prioritize and rank the most important strengths of health new financial reform applying thematic analysis and Multi-index decision making techniques such as AHP and SAW. Results: 30 main themes were extracted as the most important strengths of the health new financial management reform in the first phase, Final analysis applying AHP and SAW for ranking these strengths shows that "Support of the financial new system by management of Ministry of Health" was attained the first rank with 51 points and "personnel with low expectation" attained the last rank (25th) with 5 points. Conclusion: Although this study can help recognize the status quo after establishment of the first phase of reforms from authorities and users of these changes points of view, it is suggested that similar studies be done for identifying weaknesses and limitations of this phase of reform in Iranian health system to have better perspective of the future planning and execution of the next phases of reforms with a list of the most important weaknesses and strengths.