SEM to analyze the interaction between hospital logistics and quality of care, a systematic review

The aim of this paper is to review published research on the use of the structural equation modeling (SEM) to examine the relationship between hospital logistics and quality of care. To this end, an electronic literature search was conducted on the scientific databases of Web of Science, Scopus, ScienceDirect, PubMed and Springer, yielding a total of 591 references. Upon eliminating duplicates and applying inclusion and exclusion criteria, 13 articles were retained. These articles have used the SEM to test and validate the influence of various factors, some of them have included logistics, on the quality of care. However, logistics factors were not studied in an integrated way within a model to generate a comprehensive evidence base, upon which decisions could be made. This leads to an incomplete understanding of the causal process by which hospital logistics factors affect the quality of care.