About Journal of Hospital Management and Health Policy

Journal of Hospital Management and Health Policy

Overview and identity

The Journal of Hospital Management and Health Policy is an international, open-access, peer-reviewed online journal for research on how hospitals are led and managed and how health policy is made and implemented. It is abbreviated J Hosp Manag Health Policy and JHMHP, carries online ISSN 2523-2533, and is hosted at jhmhp.amegroups.org. It is published from Hong Kong by AME Publishing Company, with support from Wolters Kluwer, under which its content is made available on Wolters Kluwer Health's Lippincott and Ovid platforms.

The journal is the official publication of the Hospital Management Institute, Fudan University, in Shanghai. That affiliation defines it: it is a joint venture between a leading Chinese university institute devoted to hospital management and an international medical publisher, created to carry Chinese and international research on hospital management and health policy to a global readership. Published continuously from July 2017 to December 2019, it now follows a quarterly publication model, with issues in March, June, September and December.

Launch in July 2017 and the inaugural editorial

The journal was launched in July 2017. Its founding document is the Inaugural Editorial to Journal of Hospital Management and Health Policy, by Li Luo and Jiechun Gao, published as the journal's first article, J Hosp Manag Health Policy 2017;1:1, with DOI 10.21037/jhmhp.2017.07.01, received on 13 July 2017 and published on 8 September 2017. In that editorial the editors stated that, as the official journal of the Hospital Management Institute of Fudan University, published by AME Publishing Company, the journal represented their joint commitment to introduce and rethink cutting-edge studies, hot research topics and common challenges in hospital management and health policy, and to summarise and share relevant experience in policy research, development and implementation from an international perspective.

The editorial disclosure identifies the leadership precisely: Jiechun Gao served as editor-in-chief and Li Luo as executive editor-in-chief. Gao, of the Hospital Management Institute at Fudan University in Shanghai, is described in the journal's 2018 annual report as a professor and faculty fellow of hospital management, health economics and health policy at Fudan, director of the Hospital Management Institute and a doctoral advisor in the School of Public Health. Luo is described as a professor of public health, doctoral advisor in the School of Public Health and associate director of the institute. The journal thus began under the direction of the institute whose official publication it is.

The Fudan Hospital Management Institute connection

The Hospital Management Institute, Fudan University, is the journal's scholarly home. Fudan University in Shanghai is one of China's leading research universities, and its hospital-management institute brings together health economics, health policy and management research directed at China's large and rapidly reforming hospital sector. A journal owned intellectually by such an institute, rather than by a publisher alone, has a defined research community behind it: hospital presidents and managers, health-policy researchers and public-health scholars associated with Fudan and with peer institutions in China and abroad.

This structure explains the journal's bilingual-world position. It is published in English, online and open access, by a Hong Kong publisher, for an international audience, but its subject is anchored in the management questions of hospitals, prominently including Chinese hospitals undergoing payment, accreditation and quality reforms. Its editorial board reflects that design: its 2024 indexing announcement recorded 52 incumbent editorial board members from 9 countries, and its corresponding authors were reported as coming mainly from the United States, China, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and Italy.

Scope: hospital management and health policy

The journal's scope, as set out in its aims and in its author instructions, covers hospital leadership and management; health organisation and organisational behaviour in hospitals; healthcare services; healthcare quality and patient safety; health facilities management; hospital accreditation; patient and employee satisfaction; pain management; inpatient and outpatient management; health insurance; health policy; and healthcare informatics. It accepts original articles, review articles, editorials and the other article types listed in its author instructions, with manuscripts required to be original work not previously published or under consideration elsewhere, and references prepared in the Vancouver style used across medical journals.

Few medical journals occupy exactly this territory. Clinical journals take the hospital's medical output as their subject; health-economics and health-policy journals often work at the level of whole systems. JHMHP sits between them, at the level of the hospital as an organisation: how it is led, staffed, financed, accredited, digitised and made safe. Its Scopus subject classification reflects that position, placing it across health policy, leadership and management, strategy and management and health information management, spanning medicine, nursing, health professions and business and management categories simultaneously.

Early output and annual reports

The journal publishes detailed annual reports, which give its profile a verifiable factual spine. Its 2018 annual report records its launch in July 2017, its status as an electronic journal and official journal of the Hospital Management Institute, its editors-in-chief, and a total of 51 articles published in 2018. Annual reports have continued since, including a 2025 annual report issued with greetings from Professor Jiechun Gao and the editorial office, thanking editorial board members, guest editors, reviewers, authors and readers.

Cumulatively, the journal's April 2024 announcement recorded that JHMHP had published 242 articles as of 31 December 2023, including 114 original articles, 36 review articles and 22 editorial commentaries, with the remainder in other article types. Original articles thus form just under half the archive, a research-led composition appropriate to a journal whose purpose is to disseminate management and policy research rather than primarily commentary. The journal also publishes interviews with outstanding authors and with editorial board members, a community feature it maintains alongside its research content.

Indexing: Scopus and Web of Science ESCI

The journal was accepted into Scopus first: it announced that on 26 June 2021 it received confirmation from Elsevier that it had been accepted for inclusion in Scopus. Scopus-derived metrics trace its subsequent development. Its CiteScore was reported as 0.6 for 2022, 1.2 for 2023, 1.8 for 2024 and 1.7 for 2025, a rising and then stable trajectory for a niche management-and-policy title. Its SCImago Journal Rank is 0.334, with an h-index of 11 recorded in 2025 metrics listings, and its Scopus coverage is listed for 2019 and 2021 to 2025.

Web of Science indexing followed. On 18 April 2024 a confirmation letter reached the editorial office recording that the journal had been selected for inclusion in the Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI), part of the Web of Science Core Collection. Articles published from 2022 onward, beginning with volume 6, issue 1, are included in ESCI. The journal is also covered by Google Scholar and Ovid, and its digital preservation is provided through Portico, the scholarly archiving service, an arrangement its About page lists explicitly. Portico preservation matters for an online-only journal, since it guarantees that the archive survives independently of the publisher's own platform.

Metrics and standing

Following ESCI inclusion, the journal received its first impact factor, reported on its About page as 1.0 for 2024. Its later announcements record a new impact factor of 1.4 for the 2025 citation year, announced in 2026, alongside its 2025 CiteScore of 1.7. In the 2024 CiteScore rankings it placed 216th of 320 journals in health policy, 337th of 496 in strategy and management, 28th of 41 in leadership and management and 47th of 63 in health information management, all third-quartile positions in the corresponding 2025 listings.

These figures describe a small, established specialist journal: neither a high-impact general title nor an unindexed newcomer, but a Scopus- and ESCI-indexed quarterly with a decade-scale archive, stable metrics and a defined interdisciplinary niche. For a directory, that combination, an identifiable university institute as owner, a dated founding editorial, an article count in the hundreds and two independent indexing acceptances, is precisely the verifiable record a profile requires.

Editorial practice and peer review

The journal's editorial practices are documented in its own announcements. From 19 March 2020 it decided to implement transparent peer review as an option for manuscripts submitted to JHMHP, and it later announced the full implementation of transparent peer review at the journal. Transparent peer review, under which review reports are published alongside articles, was adopted by a number of AME journals in that period as a visible quality measure, and its adoption is a matter of dated public record for this title.

The journal's contact point is its editorial office at AME, and its instructions require authors to follow ICMJE disclosure practice, as the founding editors' own disclosure forms in the inaugural editorial illustrate. Manuscripts are handled through the publisher's systems, published open access on acceptance within the quarterly schedule, and distributed additionally through Wolters Kluwer's Lippincott and Ovid platforms, placing hospital-management research inside the library systems of hospitals and health-science institutions.

Readership, authorship and assessment

The journal's readers are hospital executives and managers, health-policy makers and analysts, public-health and health-services researchers, and academics in management schools who study healthcare organisations. Its authors, on its own reporting, are concentrated in the United States and China, with further corresponding authors in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and Italy, and its editorial board spans 9 countries. That geography matches its mission: Chinese hospital-management experience presented internationally, and international policy and management research made available to Chinese readers and managers, in a single English-language venue.

For users of this directory, the essential facts are these. The Journal of Hospital Management and Health Policy, J Hosp Manag Health Policy, JHMHP, online ISSN 2523-2533, is an open-access, peer-reviewed online journal launched in July 2017 as the official publication of the Hospital Management Institute, Fudan University, Shanghai, published in Hong Kong by AME Publishing Company with Wolters Kluwer support, published continuously to 2019 and quarterly thereafter, indexed in Scopus from 2021 and Web of Science ESCI from 2024 with coverage from volume 6, preserved in Portico, with a first impact factor of 1.0 for 2024 and 1.4 reported for 2025, and available at jhmhp.amegroups.org.