Information Technology Driven Innovations in Healthcare: Mapping the Research Trends by Co-Word Analysis

Todays tough market conditions push every industry to innovate to sustain. Healthcare is one of those industries facing new challenges with ever-changing demographic and economic structures. Providing the necessary financial resources for uninterrupted service provision, improving accessibility to healthcare services, development of error-proof and reliable service systems, securing data privacy, improving service quality are some of the problems healthcare industries is dealing with among many others. Information and communication technologies (ICT) provide an efficient environment to develop innovative and cost-effective solutions to these problems. In this paper, it is aimed to find answers to how ICT based innovations in healthcare take place in scientific literature and if it is possible to seize cost-effective innovation patters in the data. In line with the aim, co-word analysis is performed to the data obtained from the WoS database, and prominent themes are identified. Results demonstrate that motor themes of the field is related to the managerial dimension of digital innovations and digital transformation. There are three niche themes knowledge sharing, quality, and blockchain. The first two niche themes are chronic problems of healthcare industry while the third one is a new field and have potential to create drastic changes in data management. These fields are expected to hold over as stand-alone research fields in near future. Machine-learning applications in precision medicine is the only promising theme among emerging themes. As a final finding the data do not support any theme related to cost-effectiveness in healthcare innovations based on ICT.