Mapping the concept of health care integration: A lexicographic analysis of scientific literature
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Fecha
2024-05Autor
Urionagüena de la Iglesia, Amaia
Piquer Martínez, Celia
Benrimoj, Shalom Isaac
Calvo Hernaez, Begoña
García Cárdenas, Victoria
Gastelurrutia, Miguel Ángel
Martínez Martínez, Fernando
Fernández Llimos, Fernando
Metadatos
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Research in Social and Administrative Pharmacy 20(5) : 506-511 (2024)
Resumen
Background
Systems fragmentation is a major challenge for an efficient organization, integration being a potential solution also proposed in health care field, including pharmacy as a player. However, the use of different terms and definitions in the literature hinders the comparison of different integration initiatives.
Objective
To identify and map the terms used in scientific literature regarding integration in health care and to characterize each emerging topic.
Methods
A lexicographic analysis of the integration of healthcare systems literature indexed in PubMed was conducted. Ten different systematic searches, four using only Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) and six using text words, were conducted in March 2023. Journal scattering was analyzed following Bradford's distribution using the Leimkuhler model. An overall text corpus was created with titles and abstracts of all the records retrieved. The corpus was lemmatized, and the most used bigrams were tokenized as single strings. To perform a topic modeling, the lemmatized corpus text was analyzed using IRaMuTeQ, producing descending hierarchic classification and a correspondence analysis. The 50 words with higher chi-square statistics in each class were considered as representative of the class.
Results
A total of 42,479 articles published from 1943 to 2023 in 4469 different journals were retrieved. The MeSH “Delivery of Health Care, Integrated”, created in the 1996 MeSH update, was the most productive retrieving 33.7 % of the total articles but also retrieving 22.6 % of articles not retrieved in any other search. The text word “Integration” appeared in 15,357 (36.2 %) records. The lexicographic analysis resulted in 7 classes, named as: Evidence and implementation, Quantitative research, Professional education, Qualitative research, Governance and leadership, Clinical research, and Financial resources. Association between the classes and the searches or the text-words used ranged from moderate to weak demonstrating the lack of a standard pattern of use of terms in literature regarding healthcare integration.
Conclusions
The term “integration” and the MeSH “Delivery of Health Care, Integrated” are the most used to represent the concept of integration in healthcare and should be the preferred terms in the literature.