Managerial Challenges in Digital Health: Bibliometric and Network Analysis

Enjeux managériaux dans la Santé numérique: Analyse bibliométrique et analyse de réseau

Quentin Garçon (), Benjamin Cabanes () and Cédric Denis-Rémis ()
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Quentin Garçon: IHEIE - Institut des Hautes Etudes pour l’Innovation et l’Entrepreneuriat (IHEIE) - Mines Paris - PSL (École nationale supérieure des mines de Paris) - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres
Benjamin Cabanes: Mines Paris - PSL (École nationale supérieure des mines de Paris) - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres, CRG I3 - Centre de recherche en gestion I3 - X - École polytechnique - IP Paris - Institut Polytechnique de Paris - I3 - Institut interdisciplinaire de l’innovation - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
Cédric Denis-Rémis: IHEIE - Institut des Hautes Etudes pour l’Innovation et l’Entrepreneuriat (IHEIE) - Mines Paris - PSL (École nationale supérieure des mines de Paris) - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres

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Abstract: Background Digital health has emerged as a transformative force in modern health care systems; these systems have witnessed a surge in technological innovations and solutions over the past 2 to 3 decades. Some studies have provided overviews of keywords and journals that shed light on the current state of digital health research, and there is an increasing focus on this field of study, even in the literature on business, management, and managerial challenges. Papers and reviews are needed on challenges in digital health related to organization, management, and adoption of technological innovations, as there are currently no formal analyses or structured reviews. Objective Given the existing focus of the business and management literature on digital health, there is a need to unravel managerial challenges in digital health. By highlighting foundational themes and challenges in management science for digital health, our objective is to contribute nuanced insights into influential studies and the structure of knowledge in this interdisciplinary domain. Methods To delineate the evolving landscape of digital health management and highlight the main challenges, we conducted a comprehensive bibliometric analysis. Our analysis considered peer-reviewed, English-language papers or reviews in the management field that focused on digital health or closely related concepts. To better understand the dataset, we conducted a performance analysis. Then, we created a co-citation network using BibExcel and analyzed it by clustering the papers using the Louvain algorithm in Gephi. Results Of 1186 papers about digital health or closely related concepts published between 1994 and 2022, 520 (43.8%) were included in the co-citation network and 468 (39.5%) were placed in 4 significant clusters (>1% of the total number of nodes). The mere existence of the clusters shows that different managerial challenges have distinct research communities. The 4 clusters were (1) user adoption and engagement in mHealth, (2) adoption and trust in mHealth services, (3) digital transformation in health care, and (4) implementation challenges and ethical considerations. There are interdependent managerial challenges in digital health, and a dynamic literature review provides a more precise understanding of what is at stake (eg, adoption studies) and upcoming challenges (eg, ethical considerations). Conclusions Our co-citation analysis unveiled evolving themes in the literature on digital health management. The exploration of clusters suggested dynamic shifts related to ethical considerations, health care organizations, and societal acceptance. We encourage further research on these topics and exploration of the intricate facets of the literature on digital health management. We hope that this study provides a more comprehensive understanding of the literature and will provide researchers insights into the principal challenges and unidentified gaps, such as the novel cluster on ethics, or the need for intercluster research to create links between research communities.

Keywords: health challenges; bibliometrics digital health mobile health mHealth telemedicine management adoption ecosystems privacy literature review ethics health challenges; bibliometrics; digital health; mobile health; mHealth; telemedicine; management; adoption; ecosystems; privacy; literature review; ethics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-06-19
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Published in Journal of Medical Internet Research, 2025, 27, pp.e57980. ⟨10.2196/57980⟩

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-05121408

DOI: 10.2196/57980

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