What is HDO ILO?

Medigy is a leading voice of the digital health and therapeutics innovation community and originators of the Innovation Lifecycle Ontology. The Healthcare Delivery Organization (HO) Innovation Lifecycle Ontology (ILO) is an effort to create a standard framework of shared language that can be adopted by innovator practitioners to win at innovation.

Healthcare buyers and innovators have long needed a disciplined framework to describe their technology needs, define their desired outcomes from technology providers, and most importantly an evidence-driven evaluation method to select and deploy solutions. The goal of the Medigy ILO and related tools is to help drive adoption of an interoperable data infrastructure at HDOs.

The requirement for a shared language concept in the healthcare innovation space helps HDOs communicate more efficiently with innovation and spend time driving towards creative solutions for the correct problems. According to an article published on the University College London’s (UCL) website¹ hospitals in the US alone spend more than two thirds of the total $1 trillion a year on innovation. Patients pick hospitals depending on the innovative strategy and innovations that doctors use.

Who is the HDO ILO for?

The HDO ILO caters to the following stakeholders:

• Digital health innovation practitioners responsible for discovering and deploying practical solutions.

• Healthcare delivery professionals (HDPs), such as doctors and nurses supporting the selection, and evaluation of innovations as a core part of their daily responsibilities.

• Allied healthcare professionals, who primarily care for patients, but help in the piloting of innovative solutions.

• Innovation regulators charged with ensuring safety, and efficacy of innovative solutions used by healthcare delivery professionals, who are caring for patients.

• Innovation procurement professionals responsible for valuing, pricing, negotiating, and purchasing products, services, and solutions.

• Consultants, analysts, and influencers who guide any of the stakeholders mentioned above.

The stakeholders described above come together at the Medigy ILCoP to share problems’ definitions, define expectations, establish measures and metrics, describe best practices and, most importantly, create new knowledge to advance the professional practice of innovation procurement.

In a nutshell the 4 primary stakeholders ²:

Source: https://www.himss.org/resources/navigating-key-stakeholder-pathways-healthcare-innovators

• Decision-makers,
• Facilitators,
• Gatekeepers and
• Influencers

Refer to the section on ‘Stakeholders’ in the Ontology page for a comprehensive list of users.

Medigy invites participation from our users to fill out the description for the roles. This will help us to come up with a unanimous set of roles for innovation stakeholders.

What problems does HDO ILO solve?

There are a couple of challenges faced by HDOs to innovate and here is how the HDO ILO can address them:

1. A lot of opportunities to tap into enhancing efficiency, saving time and reducing costs is missed out due to lack of understanding in these areas. The current ILO aims to address this issue.

2. In the health sector, feedback from the patients is often not considered valuable despite the fact that studies have shown a positive impact when patients are included in the loop of innovation ³. Medigy’s ILO aims to address this in its future versions of the ILO.

3. Shortage of skills and human resources leading to high cost in training the employees, is a major hurdle to innovation. Medigy’s ILO and ILCoP (Innovation Lifecycle Community of Practice) together aim to address this issue by providing actionable insights, opportunities to network with event producers to upgrade workforce skillsets.

4. Lack of a bottom-up, shared leadership style causing a ‘Yes-man’ culture with the lack of aligned expectations and outcomes, often hinders innovation. Medigy’s ILO has diagnosed this problem and offered a solution to address this through the ‘Innovation Leadership’ framework.

5. Strict regulatory laws are major problems in the way of innovation. Medigy’s ILCoP insights and the integrated ILO address these through various innovation management roles such as gatekeepers, influencers and many more that will help mitigate the regulatory and other barriers that cause slow adoption of innovations at HDOs.

6. With the democratization of information it becomes risky to promote any innovation, as a small mishap can quickly damage a hospital’s reputation, which will be quite difficult to regain. Medigy’s ILO framework and social proof capabilities help resolve this issue.

If an HDO comes up with an innovation adhering to the ILO, and the insights on ILCoP, they could invite their peers for a transparent and unbiased feedback using Medigy’s social proof capabilities. Moreover, the ‘Innovation Ethics’ and ‘Innovation Trustworthiness’ guidance help HDOs abide by ethics and trust in their innovation process without any risk to reputation.

These are further elaborated in the section on ‘Innovation Challenges at HDOs’.

In a nutshell, Medigy’s HDO ILO aspires to help healthcare innovators improve their chances of successfully innovating at their respective Health Delivery Organizations (HDOs). This ontology serves as an Innovation Accelerator for healthcare professionals who are, directly or indirectly, involved in innovation activities at an HDO.

Why should HDOs care about the HDO ILO?

In an article on HealthcareITNews “Innovation improves competitiveness, ROI and culture,” according to Adrian Zai, MD, director of research at Partners eCare. “It is critical to innovate now more than ever as we shift to value-based care.”

Innovation practitioners perhaps should recognize the ILO as a driver of the HDOs innovation strategy that can allow them to successfully innovate.

In order for any HDO to position themselves as key drivers to innovation they should:

• Make innovation as part of their culture, and implement processes and formalize an innovation strategy. This will allow the proper flow of new ideas and are in direct correlation between good innovation processes and results.

As per Adrian Zai, MD, director of research at Partners eCare, “Formalizing your innovation strategy is critical. You have to get leadership support from the very top to back you up. And to create an infrastructure that promotes innovation across your organization. Otherwise, you’re just hitting your head on the wall.”

• Appoint innovation leadership roles and experts in the field of innovation for cross sharing of knowledge having a highly devoted and committed team can support HDOs to ensure a sustained effort towards innovation.

• Consider collaborative innovation by involving inter and intra disciplinary innovation teams. Leaders of large HDOs may not always have the time to prioritize innovation, so partnering with startups and academia would be a good strategy to access talent and innovative thinking.

• Last but the most important factor to consider while innovating, the Customer-Centric Approach⁴. This seeks out the input of customers, and other external stakeholders to speak on innovation.

1. The ILO will help innovation practitioners at innovation centers with the ability to develop, implement and lead innovation strategies in their facilities.

2. Help recognize skills to create a culture to foster an environment where innovation thrives. The ILO framework will help the innovation practitioners to create a future-focused innovation mindset to help handle new and unforeseen challenges.

3. The ILO will help HDOs to adapt with a myriad of cultural and unforeseen changes. Past research shows that prioritizing innovation during crisis can help unlock growth in the recovery, provided leaders approach it with commitment and establish key capabilities and processes, and Medigy’s HDO ILO will aim to support during such phases ⁵.

4. The ILO will help HDOs in their process to discover, evaluate and implement vendor innovations. There are too many vendor products and services to keep track of and no way to easily diffuse the best innovations. This confused state often leads to slow adoption of innovation, delaying or depriving quality care to patients.

This is where along with the ILO, Medigy’s Innovation Lifecycle Community of Practice ILCoP comes into play. Medigy’s Buyer Intent Intelligence ILCoP will enable innovation diffusion, dissemination, and implementation easier by allowing HDOs to learn from their peers.

The HDOs can manage the entire innovation lifecycle with the ILO and the ILCoP on Medigy through qualitative and quantitative evaluations, and find products and services faster by discovering what their peers are using.

With proper guidance on the topics HDOs can enhance their discoverability and evaluation of vendor innovations through an open, trusted, transparent, crowd-sourced experience. This speeds up the adoption process.

Medigy’s HDO ILO will be reviewed by industry experts and thought leaders in the field to provide insights that will improve the ontology over time.

Here is why one should care about actively participating in this mission to improve the ILO:

• By actively participating to improve the ILO and contributing to the ILCoP, members can establish an identity in the industry as an emerging thought leader.

• Help stakeholders in the innovation space perceive challenges from different angles.

• Uncover and challenge hidden innovation assumptions

• Guide the innovation journey as a leader and help launch ideas, solutions and products that can solve real time HDO problems, which ultimately achieve healthcare’s quadruple aim.