Enabling Sustainable and Technology‐Driven Health Systems: A Fuzzy Quality Function Deployment Approach for Advancing Healthcare 4.0

ABSTRACT Healthcare 4.0 can support SDG 3 and SDG 9 by using Industry 4.0 technologies to improve care delivery, operational efficiency, and environmental performance. In practice, hospitals face two persistent barriers: high uncertainty when prioritizing transformation initiatives and strict constraints related to data protection, interoperability, and legacy systems. This study addresses the need for a transparent, requirement‐driven way to identify and rank the critical success factors of sustainable Healthcare 4.0, and to translate those priorities into implementable technical actions. A hybrid framework combining Interval‐Valued Pythagorean Fuzzy AHP (IVPF‐AHP) and Quality Function Deployment (QFD) is proposed. IVPF‐AHP is used to weight sustainability‐oriented success factors under uncertainty, and QFD maps the weighted requirements to technical and managerial responses. The framework is demonstrated through a hospital case study in Istanbul with five Industry 4.0 experienced decision‐makers. Eleven sub‐factors across economic, environmental, and social dimensions are evaluated. The results show that the economic dimension carries the highest importance (48.0%), followed by the environmental (42.4%) and social (9.6%) dimensions. The highest‐priority sub‐factors are effective data source management and security (15.3%) and a digital strategy for sustainable transformation (14.6%), with circular waste management and enabling technological infrastructure also ranking among the leading requirements. The proposed approach supports decision‐makers by clarifying where to invest first to achieve a secure, measurable, and sustainability‐aligned Healthcare 4.0 transition.