OBJECTIVES: The development and research in healthcare industry has constantly created new medical materials which provide more functional and lower side-effects than former medical materials, but the price become more expensive relatively. In order to balance the trade-off between medical quality and cost reduction, hospitals have to keep making critical decisions on choosing a best cost-effectiveness of hospital materials. This study aims to develop approaches for the evaluation of hospital materials. METHODS: Since it is a multi-criteria decision-making problem, we first screen the critical factors and dichotomize them into two categories, the quantitative indicators and the qualitative indicators. The quantitative indicators include “daily expenses”, “profits”, “consumption of quantity” and “defective rate”. The qualitative indicators include “manufacture capability”, “physician preference”, “special function or design” and “safety and convenience”. We proposed to evaluate the quantitative indicators and the qualitative indicators by data envelopment analysis and analytic hierarchy process, respectively. RESULTS: This study uses four items of wound dressing for effectiveness evaluation (the code A, B, C, D to replace there’s brand names). First we accord to operation definition from the quantitative indicators to collect relevant data, and we analysis those data. Item A in the DEA method analysis results is the most effective, item D is the second, and item C is the worst.  The consultants  compare four items in pairs from the qualitative indicators, calculating the weighted by the relative importance of four items. Analysis on the four qualitative indicators, item D in the AHP method analysis results is the most effective, item A is the second, and item C is the worst. CONCLUSIONS: The proposed approaches are able to acquire a ranking of the effectiveness of hospital materials. Following our case study, we conclude that the proposed approaches may serve as more objective and effective decision-support tools for the decision makers.