8 - What Do We Know from the Vast Literature on Efficiency and Productivity in Healthcare? A Review and Bibliometric Analysis

Summary

The healthcare sector not only plays a key role in a country’s economy but is also one of the fastest growing sectors for most countries, resulting in rising expenditures. In turn, efficiency and productivity analyses of the healthcare industry have attracted attention from a wide variety of interested parties, including academics, hospital administrators, and policy makers. As a result, a large number of studies on efficiency and productivity in the healthcare industry have appeared over the past four decades in a variety of outlets. This chapter presents a performance analysis and science mapping of these studies with the aid of modern machine technology learning methods for bibliometric analysis. This approach revealed patterns and clusters in the data from 1,059 efficiency and productivity articles associated with the healthcare industry produced by nearly 2,300 authors and published in a multitude of Scopus-indexed academic journals from 1983 to 2021. Leveraging such biblioanalytics, which are combined with our own understanding of the field, the authors highlight the trends and possible future of studies on efficiency and productivity in healthcare.