Supplementary File 1 - Health Security Disparities in the Eastern Mediterranean Region

Summary: This supplementary document provides additional evidence for our research titled "Health Security Disparities in the Eastern Mediterranean Region: A Comparative Analysis Using an Integrated MCDM and Clustering Approach." It presents supplementary context and data tables to complement the primary analysis and results. This paper is structured into four sections. The first section delineates the primary health security criteria used to assess countries and their descriptions, which were applied to the decision matrices for 2019 and 2021. It also elucidates the information from the initial research phase, wherein decision matrices were constructed to establish health security criteria weights, ranks, and group countries. The second section presents the entropy calculation results employed to determine the significance of health security indicators for Eastern Mediterranean Region countries, including Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) and non-GCC nations, for both 2019 and 2021. The third section examines the application of the Entropy-VIKOT model to rank these countries' health security performance during the aforementioned years. The final section presents the clustering analysis, which categorizes countries based on their health security performance scores derived from the Entropy-VIKOT model. This analysis identified distinct performance clusters and assigned grades, demonstrating the distribution of countries across regional groups (GCC and non-GCC countries) in both years.