Healthcare Delivery Organization (HDO) Innovation Lifecycle Ontology (ILO) - HDO-ILO

Need for the concept of shared language

As per ITEMAS ¹ ontology for healthcare technology innovation, the adoption of a standardized ontology framework to innovation processes in healthcare centers could result in consistent data collection, that may contribute to better decision-making within healthcare systems. The scope of the ontology could enable healthcare centers to identify how the multiple ideas conceived evolve towards generating new products, solutions and services. The healthcare institutions will thus be able to determine the impact of creating an innovation support unit that can help define the most appropriate innovation policies.

Defining innovation for many, is complex. Each stakeholder within this lifecycle has their own unique sets of ideas and words, and often the same word means different things in different circumstances. This ambiguity in definition, while sometimes OK in human communication (especially within a particular segment of the process), can actively be detrimental when innovating, creating friction and uncertainty.

The Healthcare Delivery Innovation Lifecycle Ontology (HDO ILO) will aim at creating a standard definition and vocabulary for innovation practitioners. This accepted common language can be shared across facilities in the healthcare innovation space. Evidence-based research in the healthcare innovation space reports that no single communication format exists across healthcare centers, for use in accelerating their innovation standards, and for comparing results based on a standard set of frameworks.

Each innovation effort at HDOs will include various stakeholders such as clinicians, engineers, administrators, finance, sales, marketing, compliance, analytics, etc. They bring their different perspectives, needs, wants, and communication styles to the table. Medigy’s HDO ILO provides the much needed unifying language for effective communication among the multidisciplinary teams of stakeholders.

Medigy’s HDO ILO allows a clear platform for innovation practitioners to use in building and measuring successful innovations by identifying a usable baseline. Medigy’s HDO ILO will enable users and systems to understand and exchange the information in a useful manner, suitable for building the innovation’s infrastructure. These practices may already occur in certain HDOs, who are ahead of the curve, through the seamless knowledge transfer, for example between stakeholders, or to new sub innovation teams. Medigy’s ILO aims to become the norm to building repeatable innovation by workflows, identifying successful results, and determining the basis behind that success. Alternatively, to identify that which was not successful, and explore the reason further. Ontology will aim to define this repeatable innovation process. In this iterative process it will help establish what matters in relation to the OKRs, the goals in question and then help the teams brainstorm about it.

The dire need to implement the shared language concept in the healthcare innovation space, helps HDOs communicate more efficiently in the sphere of innovation. In this way more time is spent navigating towards creative solutions addressing the right problem.

The future scope of Medigy’s HDO ILO further explains the process in which innovative ideas and concepts evolve into products and services. Understanding the success and failure rates of these processes, and the reasoning behind them, as well as tracking that across facilities, is one of the proposed outcomes of imbibing this ontology in the HDO innovation work culture.