Implications for sustainable healthcare operations in embracing telemedicine services during a pandemic

•Identification and classification of thirty-seven key success factors of telemedicine services during COVID-19.•Contextualization of key success factors into seven dimensions (criteria).•Exploring causal relations of criteria and their classification into net causes and net receivers.•Achieving hierarchical model (credal ranking) and quantifying criteria importance (weights).•Ranking the hospitals based on their telemedicine services provided to patients.•Model usefulness for public health policymakers in pandemic crisis and long-term policy planning.