Payment Systems, Cost Information, and Behavioral Responses in Hospital Cost Management: A Bibliometric–Systematic Literature Review
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Abstract
Hospitals must contain costs while protecting quality, access, equity, and clinical autonomy. Research relevant to this challenge is dispersed across hospital cost accounting, activity-based costing, time-driven activity-based costing, diagnosis-related groups, prospective payment, reimbursement, budgeting, management control, provider behavior, and value-based healthcare. This conference paper develops a protocol-based Bibliometric-Systematic Literature Review (B-SLR) and a provisional integrative framework that connects those streams. Following the logic of Marzi et al. (2025), the study distinguishes a broad candidate corpus from a smaller sample used for interpretive synthesis. The candidate corpus contains 221 records published from 1968 to 2026. A bibliographic audit located 220 records, identified 201 DOI, found no duplicate DOI or normalized titles, and flagged one citation as likely conflated. Sixty theoretically central papers form a provisional core sample. The synthesis identifies four substantive domains: cost-information architecture; payment, reimbursement, and provider response; budgeting, management control, and actor cognition; and value-based healthcare, quality, and organizational outcomes. A fifth set supports review methodology and theory development. The proposed framework argues that payment architecture affects cost-management decisions through cost-information quality, control design, and actor cognition, while governance and professional logics shape intended and unintended outcomes. The contribution is conceptual, methodological, and explicitly provisional. A completed B-SLR still requires reproducible Scopus or Web of Science exports, formal eligibility screening, cited-reference metadata, science mapping, and cluster-based sample selection.
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