Approaching towards sustainable supply chain under the spotlight of business intelligence

Ecogastroenterology: cultivating sustainable clinical excellence in an environmentally conscious landscape

Gastrointestinal practices, especially endoscopy, have a substantial environmental impact, marked by notable greenhouse gas emissions and waste generation. As the world struggles with climate change, there emerges a pressing need to re-evaluate and reform the environmental footprint within gastrointestinal medicine. The challenge lies in finding a harmonious balance between ensuring clinical effectiveness and upholding environmental responsibility. This task involves recognising that the most significant reduction in the carbon footprint of endoscopy is achieved by avoiding unnecessary procedures; addressing the use of single-use endoscopes and accessories; and extending beyond the procedural suites to include clinics, virtual care, and conferences, among other aspects of gastrointestinal practice. The emerging digital realm in health care is crucial, given the potential environmental advantages of virtual gastroenterological care. Through an in-depth analysis, this review presents a path towards sustainable gastrointestinal practices, emphasising integrated strategies that prioritise both patient care and environmental stewardship.

Business intelligence and the leverage of information in healthcare organizations from a managerial perspective: a systematic literature review and research agenda

PURPOSE

Business intelligence (BI) systems and tools are deemed to be a transformative source with the potential to contribute to reshaping the way different healthcare organizations' (HCOs) services are offered and managed. However, this emerging field of research still appears underdeveloped and fragmented. Hence, this paper aims to reconciling, analyzing and synthesizing different strands of managerial-oriented literature on BI in HCOs and to enhance both theoretical and applied future contributions.

DESIGN/METHODOLOGY/APPROACH

A literature-based framework was developed to establish and guide a three-stage state-of-the-art systematic literature review (SLR). The SLR was undertaken adopting a hybrid methodology that combines a bibliometric and a content analysis.

FINDINGS

In total, 34 peer-review articles were included. Results revealed significant heterogeneity in theoretical basis and methodological strategies. Nonetheless, the knowledge structure of this research's stream seems to be primarily composed of five clusters of interconnected topics: (1) decision-making, relevant capabilities and value creation; (2) user satisfaction and quality; (3) process management, organizational change and financial effectiveness; (4) decision-support information, dashboard and key performance indicators; and (5) performance management and organizational effectiveness.

ORIGINALITY/VALUE

To the authors' knowledge, this is the first SLR providing a business and management-related state-of-the-art on the topic. Besides, the paper offers an original framework disentangling future research directions from each emerged cluster into issues pertaining to BI implementation, utilization and impact in HCOs. The paper also discusses the need of future contributions to explore possible integrations of BI with emerging data-driven technologies (e.g. artificial intelligence) in HCOs, as the role of BI in addressing sustainability challenges.

Sustainability in Numbers by Data Analytics

For a successful delivery of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UNSDGs) and to track the progress of UNSDGs as well as identify the gaps and the areas requiring more attention, periodic analyses on the "research on sustainability" by various countries and their contribution to the topic are inevitable. This paper tracks the trends in sustainability research including the geographical distribution on sustainability research, their level of multi-disciplinarity and the cross-border collaboration, their distribution of funding with respect to the UNSDGs, and the lifecycle analyses. Cumulative publications and patents on sustainability could be fitted to an exponential function, thereby highlighting the importance of the research on sustainability in the recent past. Besides, this analytics quantifies cross-border collaborations and knowledge integration to solve critical issues as well as traditional and emerging sources to undertake sustainability research. As an important aspect of resource sustainability and circular economy, trends in publication and funding on lifecycle assessment have also been investigated. The analytics present here identify that major sustainability research volume is from the social sciences as well as business and economics sectors, whereas contributions from the engineering disciplines to develop technologies for sustainability practices are relatively lower. Similarly, funding distribution is also not evenly distributed under various SDGs; the larger share of funding has been on energy security and climate change research. Thus, this study identifies many gaps to be filled for the UNSDGs to be successful.