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PurposeThe paper aims to discuss a systematic review of the literature about disaster management within the period 1980‐2006.Design/methodology/approachThe research protocol is based on the methodology that is commonly used in healthcare for analysing the literature and provides a state‐of‐art medical discipline. The paper presents both a descriptive analysis and a thematic analysis in order to provide a state‐of‐art of international literature. The research protocol is provided in order to make transparent the review process.FindingsThe descriptive analysis highlights the peculiarities of the literature in terms of attention paid during the years, country of provenience and clusters of content of the selected papers. The thematic analysis deepens the content of the papers formalising the state of art.Research limitations/implicationsThe review considered only academic journals and peer‐reviewed published papers, excluding working papers and books.Practical implicationsThrough both the analyses the authors argue for scholars in disaster management specific streams for further research and for providing practitioners with a state of art of disaster management discipline.Originality/valueThe paper is original and is aimed at translating to the disaster management discipline the methodology of the systematic review commonly used in healthcare disciplines.

Literature on supply chain management has been recently stressing the need for cooperation and integration between suppliers and customers, highlighting the critical role played by the supplier in contributing to the overall performance of the purchaser. Consequently supplier selection is one of the purchasing manager's most critical tasks, as demonstrated by the number of articles that have dealt with vendor selection criteria and techniques in the light of the requirements of the new environment. The paper proposes four different vendor selection systems (VSSs) depending on the time frame (short-term versus long-term) and on the content (logistic versus strategic) of the cooperative customer/supplier relationships. More precisely, the suggested VSSs consider, in an analytic hierarchy process framework, different sets of measures, deriving from a non-conventional model of the supplier based on the dynamic system and on the resource-based approach.

The VTS (Valutazione delle Tecnologie Sanitarie) framework has been successfully implemented at the end of 2011. From its inception, twenty-six technologies have been processed.

mHealth (healthcare using mobile wireless technologies) has the potential to improve healthcare and the quality of life for elderly and chronic patients. Many studies from all over the world have addressed this issue in view of the aging population in many countries. However, there has been a lack of any consolidated evidence-based study to classify mHealth from the dual perspectives of healthcare and technology. This paper reports the results of an evidence-based study of mHealth solutions for chronic care amongst the elderly population and proposes a taxonomy of a broad range of mHealth solutions from the perspective of technological complexity. A systematic literature review was conducted over 10 online databases and the findings were classified into four categories of predominant mHealth solutions, that is, self-healthcare, assisted healthcare, supervised healthcare and continuous monitoring. The findings of the study have major implications for information management and policy development in the context of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) related to healthcare in the world.