Beyond Patient Safety Goal Towards Hospital Sustainable Risk: A Systematic Review on the Evolution of Hospital Risk Management

Risk management is an indispensable tool in every business sector, yet the aspects of it are various given the business types. The hospital industry employs risk management as a day-to-day operation, but most of the time, risk management to them is related to only patient safety. In this study, our team hypothesized if there are any other aspects of hospital risk management from the research landscape.

In this manuscript, we study the aspects of hospital risk management from bibliometric data to explore hospital risk research trends.

We explore the hospital risk management research landscape to analyze past, present and future research trends using quantitative bibliometric analysis. Bibliometric data were extracted from the SCOPUS database since 1980. Descriptive analysis relating to research landscape performance will be explored. Additionally, co-occurrence analysis clustering by author’s keywords will be analyzed.

Our team extracted 803 documents related to hospital risk management from SCOPUS. The publications in this field are increasing from time to time with a 7.97% annual rate. The most productive country studying hospital risk management is the USA, while the most productive authors and citations focus on the studying of patient safety and clinical risk. However, analysing author keywords using co-occurrence, clustering, as well as a thematic map can gain hidden insights that there are emerging themes of other aspects of hospital risk management, which are: enterprise risk management and sustainability. However, these studies are researched marginally compared to clinical risk management.

Although studying hospital risk management has constantly changed for 43 years, the main focus is still clinical risk and patient safety. However, a successful hospital has the ability to enhance all stakeholders, not only from the patient’s aspect. Studying enterprise risk management and sustainability in hospitals is thus an important trend in the future.