Parametric and non-parametric frontier applications are typical for measuring the efficiency and productivity of many healthcare units. Due to the current COVID-19 pandemic, hospital efficiency is the center of academic discussions and the most desired target for many public authorities under limited resources. Investigating the state of the art of such applications and methodologies in the healthcare sector, besides uncovering strategical managerial prospects, can expand the scientific knowledge on the fundamental differences among efficiency models, variables and applications, drag research attention to the most attractive and recurrent concepts, and broaden a discussion on the specific theoretical and empirical gaps still to be addressed in future research agendas. This work offers a systematic bibliometric review to explore this complex panorama. Hospital efficiency applications from 1996 to 2022 were investigated from the Web of Science base. We selected 65 from the 203 most prominent works based on the Core Publication methodology. We provide core and general classifications according to the clinical outcome, bibliographic coupling of concepts and keywords highlighting the most relevant perspectives and literature gaps, and a comprehensive discussion of the most attractive literature and insights for building a research agenda in the field.

Digital competence plays an important role in higher education. The literature highlights the adoption and use of digital competence for the development of educational services in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), but it is still necessary to understand its influence on the innovative behavior of the public official. This study aims to investigate the influence of digital competence, based on the predictors’ infrastructure, integration, and digital management, on innovative work behaviors. The research was applied to 540 public employees of a Federal Institution of Higher Education (IFES) in northern Brazil. The response rate for this study was 33.5%. The Structural Equation Modeling approach by Partial Least Squares (PLS-SEM) was used. Empirical findings confirm that public employees with a high level of perception of digital competence more often develop challenging work to generate new innovative behaviors at work. This research was limited to investigating the influence of digital competence on innovative work behaviors of public employees of a Brazilian IFES. Future studies may address other contextual factors in this relationship. One of the practical implications is the need for managers in the education sector to support the construction of guidelines for educational and technological innovation to expand innovative behavior at work.

Data envelopment analysis (DEA) is a powerful nonparametric engineering tool for estimating technical efficiency and production capacity of service units. Assuming an equally proportional change in the output/input ratio, we can estimate how many additional medical resource health service units would be required if the number of hospitalizations was expected to increase during an epidemic outbreak. This assessment proposes a two-step methodology for hospital beds vacancy and reallocation during the COVID-19 pandemic. The framework determines the production capacity of hospitals through data envelopment analysis and incorporates the complexity of needs in two categories for the reallocation of beds throughout the medical specialties. As a result, we have a set of inefficient healthcare units presenting less complex bed slacks to be reduced, that is, to be allocated for patients presenting with more severe conditions. The first results in this work, in collaboration with state and municipal administrations in Brazil, report 3772 beds feasible to be evacuated by 64% of the analyzed health units, of which more than 82% are moderate complexity evacuations. The proposed assessment and methodology can provide a direction for governments and policymakers to develop strategies based on a robust quantitative production capacity measure.

The development of information and communication technologies accompanied by the exponential growth of electronic scholarly publications and computer archives has led, on the one hand, to the development of techniques for the systematic analysis of published literature and, on the other hand, to a significant growth in the number of literature reviews conducted and published. A systematic literature review seeks to comprehensively identify and synthesize all studies conducted on a given topic. However, how does one ensure that the entire state of the art on a given topic has been covered? How does one collect and select a large number of publications on a given topic, and how does one analyze the knowledge extracted from these publications? In other words, how do we use systematic literature analysis to produce new knowledge from existing knowledge? To make the best use of the various tools available today for conducting systematic reviews, it is necessary to be aware of their limitations. In the paper, we provide illustrations, examples, and detailed information on the various alternatives for conducting systematic reviews, presenting a review of available sources and tools. We report an analysis of the articles published in the journal International Transactions in Operational Research to show the potential and limitations of systematic review versus domain expert‐based selection. Finally, we show that a good systematic review relies on the intelligent combination of the latest tools available for conducting systematic research with the knowledge of domain experts.