Review of social networks of professionals in healthcare settings—where are we and what else is needed?

Abstract

Background Social Network Analysis (SNA) demonstrates great potential in exploring health professional relationships and improving care delivery, but there is no comprehensive overview of its utilization in healthcare settings. This review aims to provide an overview of the current state of knowledge regarding the use of SNA in understanding health professional relationships in different countries. Methods We conducted an umbrella review by searching eight academic databases and grey literature up to April 30, 2021, enhanced by citation searches. We completed study selection, data extraction and quality assessment using predetermined criteria. The information abstracted from the reviews was synthesized quantitatively, qualitatively and narratively. Results Thirteen reviews were included in this review, yielding 330 empirical studies. The degree of overlaps of empirical studies across included reviews was low (4.3 %), indicating a high diversity of included reviews and the necessity of this umbrella review. Evidence from low- and middle-income countries (LMIC), particularly Asian countries, was limited. The earliest review was published in 2010 and the latest in 2019. Six reviews focused on the construction or description of professional networks and seven reviews reported factors or influences of professional networks. We synthesized existing literature on social networks of health care professionals in the light of (i) theoretical frameworks, (ii) study design and data collection, (iii) network nodes, measures and analysis, and (iv) factors of professional networks and related outcomes. From the perspective of methodology, evidence lies mainly in cross-sectional study design and electronic data, especially administrative data showing “patient-sharing” relationships, which has become the dominant data collection method. The results about the impact of health professional networks on health-related consequences were often contradicting and not truly comparable. Conclusions Methodological limitations, inconsistent findings, and lack of evidence from LMIC imply an urgent need for further investigations. The potential for broader utilization of SNA among providers remains largely untapped and the findings of this review may contain important value for building optimal healthcare delivery networks. PROSPERO registration number The protocol was published and registered with PROSPERO, the International Prospective Register of Systematic Reviews (CRD42020205996).

Community Detection Algorithms in Healthcare Applications: A Systematic Review

“…An illustrative example is contact tracing apps that have been recently employed to model the dynamics of COVID-19 outbreak [24]. In [25], SNA was used to explore the health professional relationships in a way to identify potential gaps in these relationships, which would trigger appropriate action by health authorities. In [26], the authors investigated the application of SNA in obesity, hypothesizing that individuals with similar body weight tend to form a community.…”

Analyzing annual changes in network structures of a social media application-based information-sharing system in a Japanese community

“…Additionally, by analyzing relationships (links) between nodes, the roles and influences of particular nodes in the network can be examined. Such SNAs can provide a theoretical approach for exploring interactions of nodes in the network based on social interaction frameworks [11] SNA has been used in a variety of ways in systematic reviews in healthcare settings [12][13][14]. However, in some studies SNA has been used as a descriptive tool rather than an evaluative one, and few annual analyses of information-sharing networks of healthcare professionals exist.…”

Representation of the hierarchical and functional structure of an ambulatory network of medical consultations through social network analysis, with an emphasis on the role of medical specialties

“…Therefore, characterizing the organic and hierarchical functioning of an HCN through objective metrics can be strategically important for health managers, allowing them to: identify informal patterns or hierarchies among health actors that reveal the forces governing the organic functioning of the network; compare the observed structure of the HCN with the structure of other external networks, the same network over time, or with that expected according to the health care model proposed by the manager for department visits [8]. Although these and other studies point to promising results in the use of SNA for analyzing complex HCN, the most appropriate set of measures and evaluation metrics, as well as their clinical and administrative/managerial significance, remains uncertain [2,9,10]. The purpose of this study is to characterize the structural and functional topology of the Amb-HCN of a private health insurance provider (PHIP) through objective measures and metrics, based on the referral and counter-referral circuits, whether explicit or spontaneous, established between network physicians during patient care in their offices.…”