The rise of smart healthcare in smart cities: A Bibliometric Literature Review and avenue for a research agenda

¹ Department of Economics, University of Foggia, Foggia, Italy
² Department of Management, Finance and Technology, LUM - Libera Università Mediterranea “Giuseppe Degennaro”, Casamassima, Bari, Italy

^* Corresponding author: annaroberta.gagliardi@unifg.it

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to review and critique the literature on the role of smart cities within the healthcare context, providing an overview of the state of research and outlining a future research agenda. Initially, six hundred and seventeen newspaper articles were extracted from Scopus, and their content was analysed for the article selection process by the two researchers in parallel. Finally, forty-six articles dealing with smart cities in healthcare and published in various academic journals have been analysed through content analysis and bibliometric analysis. The results show that the literature on this research topic is somewhat scarce and dominated by unrelated research. Content analysis provides the emergence of three main strands of research: 1) Smart cities as a tool for health security; 2) Smart cities as sources of opportunities for data communication in healthcare; 3) Smart cities for the creation of knowledge and skills in healthcare. The paper presents the first attempt to provide a comprehensive, structured literature review of the role of smart cities in the healthcare environment after the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. Despite the growing literature on smart cities, this research area contextualised the healthcare context is still fragmented and under-theorised. More systematic and holistic studies are needed, considering the technological, economic, and social aspects of the importance of smart cities in the healthcare system.