Trends and characteristics of China's medical informatization policy from 1996 to 2020: a bibliometric analysis

Abstract

PurposeQualitative methods are not suitable to process high volumes of policy texts for exploring policy evolution. Therefore, it is hard to use qualitative methods to systematically analyze the characteristics of complex policy networks. So the authors propose a bibliometric research study for exploring policy evolution from time–agency–theme perspectives to excavate the rules and existing problems of China's medical informatization policy and to provide suggestions for formulating and improving the future medical informatization policies.Design/methodology/approachInitially, 615 valid samples are obtained by retrieving related China's medical informatization policy documents, and the joint policy-making agency network and the co-occurrence network models of medical informatization policies are defined, and then the authors research China's medical informatization policies from single-dimension and multi-dimension view.FindingsThe analysis results reveal that China's medical informatization policy process can be divided into four stages; the policy-making agencies are divided into four subgroups by community detection analysis according to the fast unfolding algorithm; the core policy theme keywords are identified based on the eigenvector centrality of the nodes in those networks; the focuses of theme terms are varied in different stages and the correlations between agencies and themes are gradually decentralized.Practical implicationsThese findings provide experience and evidence on leveraging informatics in the medical and healthcare field of China. Also, they can help scholars and practitioners better understand the current status and future directions of medical and healthcare informatics development in China and provide a reference to formulate and improve China's future medical informatization policies.Originality/valueThis study proposes a quantitative bibliometric-based research framework to describe transitions and trends of China's medical informatization policy.

Spatio-temporal pattern, matching level and prediction of ageing and medical resources in China

“…Since 2009, China has actively engaged in medical reform in response to the increasing demand for healthcare services from the elderly population [ 11 ]. For example, the "integration of medical treatment and elderly support" reform promotes the embedding of medical and health services into the community and institutional care for the elderly [ 12 ]. Recent reforms in public hospitals and the construction of a hierarchical healthcare system have provided a strong impetus for the development of senior healthcare [ 13 ].…”

Analysing scientific publications in the field of mobile information systems using bibliometric analysis

“…Initiated from the field of library and information science, bibliometric analysis has increasingly spread to a wide range of fields and has been used to identify emerging trends and new developments and to explore collaboration patterns and intellectual structures. There are many examples of bibliometric studies in the literature based on different topics, such as business research (Kumar et al , 2021; Wei and Zhang, 2020; Zhang et al , 2021), transportation research (Meyer, 2020; Modak et al , 2019), public health (Cooper et al , 2021; Ngwenya and Boshoff, 2020), computer science (Luo et al , 2018) and medical study (Montefusco et al , 2019; Xu et al , 2021). One of the advantages of bibliometric analysis is that it can objectively study research published in a given field by considering only the relevant data of papers obtained from the Web of Science (WoS) (Merigo et al , 2015).…”