Business and Economic Intelligence in Healthcare, A Systematic ScopingReview

Abstract Book of the 11th International Conference on Management, Economics and Finance

Year: 2026

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Business and Economic Intelligence in Healthcare, A Systematic ScopingReview

Yassine El Aroubi, Fairouz Naji

ABSTRACT:

Hospital managers are drowning in data and still making decisions by instinct. That tensionsits at the center of this scoping review, which draws on 12 studies, identified through aPRISMA-ScR process across Scopus and Web of Science, to examine how BusinessIntelligence and Economic Intelligence systems actually function in hospital governance. Thegeographic spread is wide: Denmark, Belgium, Portugal, the United Kingdom, Iran, Jordan,Thailand, Vietnam. But the LMIC and MENA cases carry particular weight here, sinceMoroccan public hospitals share more with Bangkok or Amman than with Copenhagen interms of how IT decisions get made, who makes them, and what resources are available tosustain them.What emerges is less a story about tools and more a story about organizational conditions.Adoption stalls not because the dashboards are bad, but because executive commitment isabsent, user satisfaction is neglected, and readiness is assumed rather than built. Theframeworks that dominate the literature were developed in high-income, often private,settings. Public hospitals, where governance answers to political authorities and operatesunder equity mandates, barely appear.
There is also something the literature never quite gets to. The KPIs that hospital managersconsistently rank as most important — bed occupancy, discharge rates, staffing ratios,revenue — are structurally the same variables that feed a Data Envelopment Analysis model.Yet not one of the 12 reviewed studies connects DEA efficiency scores to a governancedecision-support system.

Keywords: Business intelligence · Economic intelligence · Hospital management · Decisionsupport systems · KPI dashboards · Scoping review · DEA efficiency frontier · Maturitymodels · Public hospitals · LMIC · MENA · Organizational adoption · Implementationbarriers