Abstract: The long-term care for disabled elders has become a social security issue that need to be settled urgently in China. The design of the long-term care system is an important basis for solving this problem, and identifying the influencing factors of the system is a key premise of system design. In light of this, initial influencing factors of long-term care system design are collected and summarized based on academic studies and practices regarding to the long-term care. Information repetition is reduced with the help of the rough set theory to derive 16 influencing factors of long-term care system design. Interval gray number and DEMATEL techniques are jointed used to observe the impacts of each indicator on the design of long-term care system. The results demonstrate that nine indicators including long-term care top-level design, long-term care service demand, long-term care insurance type selection, long-term care legislation, long-term care payment content, long-term care service system design, evaluation criteria for disability grade, learning from international experiences, payment standard of long-term care insurance are direct influencing factors and are the essence of long-term care system design. In the meanwhile, the remaining seven indicators are indirect influencing factors, which play an assistant role in the system design. During this process, the relationships and influence degree of various factors should be comprehensively taken into account to promote the steady progress of the long-term care system design. This study provides a new research perspective and method for determinants identification of the long-term care system design in China, and also provides a theoretical reference for the design of long-term care system.

Key words: long-term care, system design, influencing factor, DEMATEL