Relaţia între o evaluare bibliometrică şi clasificarea spitalelor din România după performanţa profesională

BACKGROUND. In 2011, the Romanian Ministry of Health and Family (MHF) issued a classification of Romanian
hospitals based primarily to their ability to provide medical assistance to the population. Hospitals were classified
into 5 MHF categories, from I—highest ability, to V—lowest ability, plus two subcategories, IM and IIM, for
the clinical institutes, specialised hospitals focused on advanced diagnosis, treatment and research of specific
conditions.
PURPOSE. In this report we aimed to verify how this classification is related to bibliometric indices.
METHODS. We performed descriptive statistics on indices found for hospitals in the Ad Astra White Book of Ro-
manian Research, that reports all romanian institutions over the 2002–2011 interval, and the MHF classification
results for 2011.
RESULTS. Both the number of papers published in journals indexed in Web of Science and the cumulative
relative influence score were strongly associated with the MHF category.
The first four categories (I, IM, II and IIM) as established on professional grounds, that include 20% of the
hospitals and clinical institute, amount for 94% of the main current publications. All these hospitals are located
in cities that also host medical universities. Productive research groups were identified, however, in each of the
MHF the categories.
All of the professional category I hospitals published more than 10 papers per decade, however in the others
there is a proportion of hospitals and institutions that have not been found at all in the ISI database, and this
proportion increases monotonously with the category classification. The 10 papers per decade criterion is 90%
specific and 50% selective for the first four categories.
CONCLUSION. Despite the fact that the professional classification methodology largely ignored bibliometric
evaluation of hospitals, its results were strongly associated with the results of an entirely independent, bibliomet-
ric, assessment that was designed for the evaluation of research institutions in general. This is an illustration of
the relevance of certain bibliometric indices even for the evaluation of apparently unrelated parameters, such as
institutional health services performance.