Background: Performance is a multi-dimensional and dynamic concept. During the past 2 decades, considerable studieswere performed in developing the hospital Performance concept. To know literature key concepts on hospitalPerformance, the knowledge visualization based on co-word analysis and social network analysis has been used.Methods: Documents were identified through “PubMed” searching from1945 to 2014 and 2350 papers entered thestudy after omitting unrelated articles, the duplicates, and articles without abstract. After pre-processing and preparingarticles, the key words were extracted and terms were weighted by TF-IDF weighting schema. Support as an interestingnessmeasure, which considers the co-occurrence of the extracted keywords and "hospital Performance" phrasewas calculated. key word having high support with "hospital Performance" are selected. Term-term matrix of theseselected keywords is calculated and the graph is extracted.Results: The most high frequency words after “Hospital Performance” were “mortality” and “efficiency”. The majorknowledge structure of hospital Performance literature during these years shows that the keyword “mortality” had thehighest support with hospital Performance followed by “quality of care”, “quality improvement”, “discharge”, “lengthof stay” and “clinical outcome”. The strongest relationship is seen between “electronic medical record” and “readmissionrate”.Conclusion: Some dimensions of hospital Performance are more important such as “efficiency”, “effectiveness”, “quality” and “safety” and some indicators are more highlighted such as “mortality”, “length of stay”, “readmissionrate” and “patient satisfaction”. In the last decade, some concepts became more significant in hospital Performanceliterature such as “mortality”, “quality of care” and “quality improvement”.