What is the performance in public hospitals? A longitudinal analysis of performance plans through topic modeling

BACKGROUND: Both the concept of performance and the role of hospitals in health systems evolved significantly in the last decades. Today, the performance in health could be defined as the ability to create ‘population value,’ and the hospitals’ role is to support this aim by providing acute care and by integrating and coordinating their activity with other settings of care. This research aims to assess how and with what degree the management of public hospitals have embraced in practice the updated concept of performance and their new role. RESULT: The paper analyses 181 performance plans of 48 Italian autonomous public hospitals over a nine-year period through the topic modeling algorithm called Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). This is a method that allows for analysing large textual corpora that generates a representation of the latent topics discussed therein. The concept of performance in public hospitals was framed into 15 topics resulting from the analysis of the hospitals’ performance plans. The prevalence of each topic was analysed through the period considered so as to understand the evolution of performance-related practices over the last decade. CONCLUSION: In recent years, the concept of performance in hospitals evolved toward the adoption of an outcome-based and population-based perspective. Additional effort should be devoted toward improved collaboration and integration of care with other settings. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12913-021-06332-4.