Thi-Duong Nguyen

The provision of efficient healthcare services is essential, driven by the increasing demand for healthcare resources and the need to optimize hospital operations. In this context, the motivation to innovate and improve services while addressing urgent concerns is critical. Hospitals face challenges in managing internal dispatch services efficiently. Outsourcing such services can alleviate the burden on hospital staff, reduce costs, and introduce professional expertise. However, the pressing motivation lies in enhancing service quality, minimizing costs, and exploring innovative approaches. With the rising demand for healthcare services, there is an immediate need to streamline hospital operations. Delays in internal transportation services can have far-reaching implications for patient care, necessitating a prompt and effective solution. Drawing upon dispatch data from a healthcare center in Taiwan, this study constructed a decision-making model to optimize the allocation of hospital service resources. Employing simulation techniques, we closely examine how hospital services are currently organized and how they work. In our research, we utilized dispatch data gathered from a healthcare center in Taichung, Taiwan, spanning from January 2020 to December 2020. Our findings underscore the potential of an intelligent dispatch strategy combined with deployment restricted to the nearest available workers. Our study demonstrates that for cases requiring urgent attention, delay rates that previously ranged from 5% to 34% can be notably reduced to a much-improved 3% to 18%. However, it is important to recognize that the realm of worker dispatch remains subject to a multifaceted array of influencing factors. It becomes evident that a comprehensive dispatching mechanism must be established as part of a broader drive to enhance the efficiency of hospital service operations.

Despite the many benefits that energy consumption brings to the economy, consuming energy also leads nations to expend more resources on environmental pollution. Therefore, energy efficiency has been proposed as a solution to improve national economic competitiveness and sustainability. However, the growth in energy demand is accelerating while policy efforts to boost energy efficiency are slowing. To solve this problem, the efficiency gains in countries where energy consumption efficiency is of the greatest concern such as China, India, the United States, and Europe, especially, emerging economies, is central. Additionally, governments must take greater policy actions. Therefore, this paper studied 25 countries from Asia, the Americas, and Europe to develop a method combining the grey method (GM) and data envelopment analysis (DEA) slack-based measure model (SMB) to measure and forecast the energy efficiency, so that detailed energy efficiency evaluation can be made from the past to the future; moreover, this method can be extended to more countries around the world. The results of this study reveal that European countries have a higher energy efficiency than countries in Americas (except the United States) and Asian countries. Our findings also show that an excess of total energy consumption is the main reason causing the energy inefficiency in most countries. This study contributes to policymaking and strategy makers by sharing the understanding of the status of energy efficiency and providing insights for the future.

The Information and Communication Industry (ICT) plays a very important role in the growth of any nation. Therefore, the ITC sector attracts the great attention of the researcher. Despite many breakthroughs and favorable conditions to develop, the Information and Communication Industry (ICT) of Vietnam stands in a very modest position on the world’s ICT map. Therefore, understanding and having an outlook on the performance of companies in this field contribute to the development of the ICT industry in Vietnam. For this reason, the current study is conducted with the main purpose of assessing the performance of 24 Vietnamese ITC companies over past and future periods by applying a hybrid model, including Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and Grey model (GM). The author used GM to forecast the future value of inputs and output over period 2018–2022, and then forecasted data is used together with the data of previous years to evaluate the performance of these companies by two models of DEA—Malmquist productivity index (MPI) model and super-SBM-model. This study proposed an approach that can be used by policymakers and decision-makers to develop policies and strategies to sustain the development of the Vietnam ICT industry.

Since energy efficiency and energy improvement are viewed as two of the most important keys of sustainable management, research on energy has become popular and captured much more attention. The current paper aimed to measure the energy efficiency of 25 countries with carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions as well as their energy efficiency improvement. First, a data envelopment analysis (DEA) slack-based model (SBM) was employed to obtain efficiency scores. Second, the Malmquist Productivity Index (MPI) was then used to examine the improvement during the period of 2010–2017. Findings of this study showed that developed countries had a more balanced development between gross domestic product (GDP) growth and CO₂ emissions by using the same inputs as developing countries. Additionally, the findings revealed that India and China, being the two largest population countries, achieved improved energy intensity during 2010–2017; however; their energy consumption and CO₂ emissions continued to grow, leading them to being the two worst countries in terms of energy efficiency.