BACKGROUND The casemix-based payment system has been adopted in many countries, although it often needs complementary adjustment taking account of each hospital's unique production structure such as teaching and research duties, and non-profit motives. It has been challenging to numerically evaluate the impact of such structural heterogeneity on production, separately of production inefficiency...

Innovation talents, as a most active and important resource in innovation activities, are receiving increasing attention in the enhancement of innovation capability. It seems that areas with strong innovation capability are more attractive to innovation talents. To explore the impact of innovation capability—measured by innovation environment input efficiency—on the distribution of innovation t...

BACKGROUND This study is based on competitive dynamics theory, and discusses competitive actions (including their implementation requirements, strategic orientation, and action complexity) that influence hospitals' performance, while also meeting the requirements of Taiwan's "global budget" insurance payment policy. METHODS In order to investigate the possible actions of hospitals, the study ...

BACKGROUND To reduce avoidable hospital readmissions, effective discharge planning and appropriate post discharge support care are key requirements. This study is a 3-staged process to develop, pretest and pilot a framework for an effective discharge planning system in Hong Kong. This paper reports on the methodology of Delphi approach and findings of the second stage on pre-testing the framewo...

W e analyze the value of and interaction between production postponement and information sharing, which are two distinct strategies to reduce manufacturers’ uncertainty about demand. In both single-level and two-level supply chains, from the manufacturer’s perspective, while information sharing is always valuable, production postponement can sometimes be detrimental. Furthermore, the value of p...

We present results of high-precision calculations for a boron atom’s properties using wave functions expanded in the explicitly correlated Gaussian basis. We demonstrate that the well-optimized 8192 basis functions enable a determination of energy levels, ionization potential, and fine and hyperfine splittings in atomic transitions with nearly parts per million precision. The results open a win...