A Knowledge Map for Hospital Performance Concept: Extraction and Analysis: A Narrative Review Article

Background: Performance is a multi-dimensional and dynamic concept. During the past 2 decades, considerable studies were performed in developing the hospital performance concept. To know literature key concepts on hospital performance, the knowledge visualization based on co-word analysis and social network analysis has been used. Methods: Documents were identified through “PubMed” searching from 1945 to 2014 and 2350 papers entered the study after omitting unrelated articles, the duplicates, and articles without abstract. After pre-processing and preparing articles, the key words were extracted and terms were weighted by TF-IDF weighting schema. Support as an interestingness measure, which considers the co-occurrence of the extracted keywords and “hospital performance” phrase was calculated. Keywords having high support with “hospital performance” are selected. Term-term matrix of these selected keywords is calculated and the graph is extracted. Results: The most high frequency words after “Hospital Performance” were “mortality” and “efficiency”. The major knowledge structure of hospital performance literature during these years shows that the keyword “mortality” had the highest support with hospital performance followed by “quality of care”, “quality improvement”, “discharge”, “length of stay” and “clinical outcome”. The strongest relationship is seen between “electronic medical record” and “readmission rate”. Conclusion: Some dimensions of hospital performance are more important such as “efficiency”, “effectiveness”, “quality” and “safety” and some indicators are more highlighted such as “mortality”, “length of stay”, “readmission rate” and “patient satisfaction”. In the last decade, some concepts became more significant in hospital performance literature such as “mortality”, “quality of care” and “quality improvement”.