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Machine learning is increasingly used in hospital operations, revenue cycle management, and quality monitoring. These administrative applications require transparency because their outputs can influence access, resource allocation, financial decisions, and accountability. This systematic review examined explainable machine learning methods applied to operational decision support, revenue cycle analytics, and quality monitoring in healthcare administration. The review focused on the type, depth, and use of transparency methods rather than predictive performance. A PRISMA 2020–compliant search strategy was applied to PubMed, Scopus, IEEE Xplore, and Web of Science for studies published between 2017 and 2022. Screening, extraction, and narrative synthesis focused on administrative domain, model type, explanation method, stakeholder use, and risk of bias. SHAP and LIME were the most frequently discussed post-hoc explanation approaches, while feature importance, partial dependence, rule-based models, and attention mechanisms appeared in smaller subsets of the literature. Operational decision support showed the strongest explainability uptake, whereas revenue cycle analytics and administrative quality monitoring remained less developed. Explainability in healthcare administration remains uneven and often superficial. The largest gap is not the availability of explanation tools, but the limited evidence that explanations improve managerial decisions, accountability, fairness, or auditability.

Healthcare administration generates large volumes of textual data, including clinical notes, billing documentation, incident narratives, portal messages, and operational records. These data create administrative burden but also provide opportunities for natural language processing to support documentation, coding, communication, safety review, and workflow automation. This systematic review examined natural language processing models applied to healthcare administration from 2017 to 2024. The review focused on five domains: clinical documentation, coding support, incident reporting, patient communication, and workflow automation. A PRISMA 2020-compliant review was conducted using structured searches of PubMed, Scopus, IEEE Xplore, and Web of Science for studies published between 2017 and 2024. Eligible studies were screened by two reviewers, extracted using a structured template, and synthesized narratively by administrative domain, model type, evaluation approach, and implementation maturity. Transformer-based models were increasingly prominent across the reviewed literature, particularly in documentation support, automated coding, and clinical text classification. Clinical documentation and coding support had the strongest evidence base, while incident reporting, patient communication, and workflow automation remained less mature and less frequently evaluated in real-world settings. Natural language processing for healthcare administration is technically promising, but most applications remain at the retrospective or proof-of-concept stage. Prospective validation, workflow integration, governance, and human oversight are needed before widespread operational adoption.

Healthcare administration is document-intensive, communication-heavy, and increasingly dependent on digital systems that require timely synthesis of clinical and operational information. Generative artificial intelligence has been proposed as a potential means of reducing administrative workload across documentation, reporting, patient communication, governance, and workflow coordination. This systematic review examined applications of generative artificial intelligence across five healthcare administrative domains: documentation support, operational reporting, patient communication, governance dashboards, and workflow automation. The review aimed to characterize reported use cases, model types, evaluation approaches, implementation barriers, and evidence maturity from 2017 to 2025. A PRISMA 2020-compliant search strategy was applied to PubMed, Scopus, IEEE Xplore, and Web of Science for studies published between January 1, 2017, and December 31, 2025. Screening was conducted in duplicate, and eligible studies were synthesized narratively by administrative domain. Documentation support was the most mature domain, particularly for clinical summarization, discharge summaries, patient-message drafting, and document classification. Operational reporting and governance dashboards were emerging areas, while patient communication and workflow automation showed diverse prototypes but limited prospective validation. Common challenges included hallucination, privacy, bias, regulatory uncertainty, integration burden, and limited evidence of real-world administrative impact. Generative artificial intelligence appears technically capable of supporting multiple healthcare administrative tasks, but evidence remains uneven across domains. Real-world impact, safety, scalability, and governance require stronger evaluation before these systems can be relied upon for high-stakes administrative decision-making.