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

Abstract

Purpose

Qualitative 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/approach

Initially, 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.

Findings

The 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 implications

These 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/value

This study proposes a quantitative bibliometric-based research framework to describe transitions and trends of China's medical informatization policy.

Citation

Xu, M., Gan, D., Pan, T. and Sun, X. (2021), "Trends and characteristics of China's medical informatization policy from 1996 to 2020: a bibliometric analysis", Aslib Journal of Information Management, Vol. 73 No. 5, pp. 720-753. https://doi.org/10.1108/AJIM-04-2021-0112