The evolutionary path of health expenditure research: unveiling dynamic insights through topic modeling

The increasing burden of healthcare services on national economies has made understanding the dynamics of health expenditure a crucial issue. Therefore, there is a need to analyze the complex and interdependent patterns of these dynamics. The aim of the study is to identify the key themes in the literature related to health expenditure and examine the relationships between them. A total of 3,449 scientific publications were obtained from the Web of Science database, and topic modeling was conducted using the Latent Dirichlet Allocation model. As a result, the themes related to health expenditure were identified as health economics and policy, healthcare services and research, patient care and health outcomes, and healthcare cost and utilization. The findings emphasize the importance of adopting cost-effective practices, improving service processes, and integrating health outcomes into healthcare service processes for effective management of health expenditure. Additionally, the study shows that topic modeling provide valuable insights for policymakers in the healthcare sector and that machine learning approaches can lead to more scalable and efficient solutions in healthcare domain.