Managerial challenges in Digital Health: a bibliometric and network analysis (Preprint)

BACKGROUND Digital health has emerged as a transformative force in modern healthcare systems, witnessing a surge in technological innovations and solutions over the past two to three decades. Some studies gave an overview of the keywords and journals to decipher the visibility of digital health. Despite the increasing focus on digital health, a critical gap persists in quantifying the trends of peer-reviewed publications specifically within the management and organization literature. OBJECTIVE To delineate the evolving landscape of digital health management literature from 1994 to 2022, this study aims to conduct a comprehensive bibliographic, bibliometric, and network analysis. By unveiling research trends and clusters, our objective is to contribute nuanced insights into the pivotal themes, influential works, and the structure of knowledge within this interdisciplinary domain. Additionally, we extend our investigation to identify and analyze literature clusters thanks to co-citation patterns, unraveling the intricate connections and themes that define the evolving landscape of digital health management research. METHODS After a keyword analysis, all peer-reviewed, published before 2023, English-written articles or reviews on Scopus were considered in our analysis as soon as the main focus was digital health or closely related keywords. To unveil clusters and trends, a bibliographic-bibliometric or co-citations network analysis was conducted using Gephi to identify clusters. RESULTS Out of 1186 papers about digital health or other highly-related keywords published between 1994 and 2022, 520 articles (43.8%) were included in the co-citation network and 468 papers were in significant clusters (>1% of the total number of nodes) and divided into 4 modularity classes. These 4 clusters were then interpreted using the highest centrality degree nodes of each cluster (“Adoption-engagement”, “Behavior-trust-privacy”, “Ecosystem transformations” and “Ethics-usage”) with an analysis of the keywords and the most cited articles. CONCLUSIONS Our co-citation analysis unveils evolving themes in digital health management literature. Our study provides a snapshot from 1994 to 2022. While we refrain from extensive citation analysis, our thematic exploration suggests dynamic shifts in ethical considerations, global healthcare organization, and societal and professional acceptance. Encouraging further research in these nuanced clusters, our study prompts ongoing exploration into the intricate facets of the digital health management literature. With a more comprehensive understanding of the digital health management literature dynamic, we also hope that this study provides management researchers and health researchers insights on the principal fields to address further unidentified gaps.