study of different islamic agreements efficiency in free of interest banking system through modern scientific approaches is of outmost importance. in this paper attempt has been made to study and compare the efficiency of charity loan agreement and cooperative agreements by dea approach in branches of mellat bank in kermanshah province as case study. in this direction, the data related to five ...

Background Many of public hospitals in Japan have had a deficit for a long time. Japanese local governments have been encouraging public hospitals to use group purchasing of drugs to benefit from the economies of scale, and increase their bargaining power for obtaining discounts in drug purchasing, thus improving their financial situation. In this study, we empirically investigate whether or no...

OBJECTIVES Chinese county hospitals have been excessively enlarging their scale during the healthcare reform since 2009. The purpose of this paper is to examine the technical efficiency and productivity of county hospitals during the reform process, and to determine whether, and how, efficiency is affected by various factors. SETTING AND PARTICIPANTS 114 sample county hospitals were selected ...

Case-based planners often face the problem of incurring more computational cost for retrieving and modifying a case for reuse, than what can be saved by reusing the case. We present a case-based planning system that learns the performance of a given planner (called the default planner) in a training phase, and exploits this knowledge to retrieve and reuse cases such that planning effort is save...

this study aimed to measure the hospital productivity using data envelopment analysis (dea) technique and malmquist indices.this is a cross sectional study in which the panel data were used in a 4 year period from 2007 to 2010. the research was implemented in 12 teaching and non-teaching hospitals of ahvaz county. data envelopment analysis technique and the malmquist indices with an input-orien...

The efficiency of an heat engine is traditionally defined as the ratio of its average output work over its average input heat. Its highest possible value was discovered by Carnot in 1824 and is a cornerstone concept in thermodynamics. It led to the discovery of the second law and to the definition of the Kelvin temperature scale. Small-scale engines operate in the presence of highly fluctuating...