Collaboration of issuing agencies and topic evolution of health informatisation policies in China

Abstract

Digital transformation in the Chinese healthcare industry has led national government agencies to issue a series of policies to guide the construction of health informatisation. However, little is known about the issuing agencies and the topics of health informatisation policies. This study aimed to explore the collaboration of policies issuing and the evolution of policy topics. In this study, a total of 156 policy documents were identified. Author–Topic model and pre-discretised method based on Latent Dirichlet Allocation model were employed to mine the correlation between the issuing agencies and policy topics, and the evolution of policy contents. Findings suggest that the development of health informatisation policies can be divided into three stages. The number of policies has been increasing constantly, among which the policy of opinion and notification accounts for the vast majority. Many government agencies are involved in formulating policies collaboratively. On the whole, the topics changed constantly over time. From 2003 to 2008, policy topics focused on standards and specifications, with the phenomenon of splitting and development. From 2009 to 2014, policies were predominantly related to the construction of regional health informatisation, with some emerging topics generating. Internet + medical and new information technology gained attention from 2015 to 2020; most topics in this period were inherited, split or merged from the previous period. This study is helpful to research and formulation of the health informatisation-related policies.