Integration model between hospital and community care services: the bibliometric impact

Background: Due to these trends, there is a steady increase in healthcare complexity, and coordination has become a high-priority need in healthcare delivery. The aim is to provide a comprehensive overview on the role of integration between hospital and community care setting in primary care from three different conceptual frameworks: integrated care, intermediate care and transitional care. Methods: A comprehensive literature review and a bibliometric analisys were carried out. MEDLINE database was queried for relevant studies using the standard Population-Intervention-Context-Outcome (PICO) model to ensure the included articles matched the study objectives. The concepts of integrated care, transitional care, intermediate care and hospital were combined into a standardized search string using MeSH and non-MeSH entry terms. Descriptive and inferential statistics were performed. A linear regression analysis was used to study the research trends: the number of articles per year was considered as dependent variable in a logarithmic scale. Results: A total of 2102 documents were screened according to the inclusion and exclusion criteria. The distribution of articles among the countries vary from 0,005% of the Switzerland to 26,7% of the USA. Linear regression analysis was performed on the countries grouped by geographical area, excluding countries with a small number of articles. The time trend analysis showed an increase by 8% of the number of published articles per year (CI 95% 5%-11%) in the total of Countries, by 7% per year (CI95% 4%-10%) in North American Countries and of 6% per year (CI95% 2%-10%) in European Countries. Conclusions: The bibliometric analysis revealed escalating trends in the number of interventions carried out to implement the concept of integration between hospital and community care services. Integration in care delivery is a promising approach for improving patients and health professionals experience and health outcomes. Key messages: To evaluate and summarize the interest of the academic community on to the impact of hospital and community care services integration. Three conceptual frameworks: integrated care, intermediate care and transitional care were examined to analyze this topic.