Donghua Yiwei Unveils 'Yiwei Methodology' and New Digital Platforms to Propel Healthcare IT into the Next Decade

Over the past three decades of development in hospital management systems, their functions have gradually expanded from the initial scope of financial management to increasingly incorporate operational systems such as LIS, PACS, and EMR.

The vast majority of hospital administrators and system architects failed to anticipate that the functional boundaries of hospital management systems would continue to expand in subsequent development. When departmental physicians raised new requirements, these systems often had to rely on third-party software add-ons, meeting basic needs at the expense of system functionality and user experience.

However, as new concepts such as smart hospitals and big data management emerge, the traditional piecemeal approach—“treating the head when it aches and the foot when it hurts”—can no longer support the new technologies underpinning digital infrastructure and the ever-proliferating new applications. At this juncture, hospitals urgently need a new methodology that employs holistic thinking to systematically address the myriad challenges encountered in IT construction.

On March 31, at the DHC Mediway 2023 Grand Health IT Summit (iMEDWAY SUMMIT 2023) held at the Hyatt Regency Beijing Wangjing, the “Mediway Methodology” was pioneered in the industry to address various challenges encountered in hospital IT construction. Under the theme “Gathering Momentum for Innovation, Winning the Future with Intelligence,” more than 1,000 guests, including experts, decision-makers, and corporate leaders from China’s medical and grand health sectors, convened to discuss issues and solutions within the Hospital Information Technology (HIT) industry. They focused on hot topics such as public hospital reform, enhancement of hospital management capabilities, high-quality hospital development, and urban smart healthcare, seeking new directions and drivers for the digital transformation of the grand health sector.

As the conference organizer, DHC Mediway not only introduced its unique “Mediway Methodology,” but also launched two new products: the Digital Twin and Decision Support Platform (DTS) and the Intelligent Data Platform (iBDP), along with two next-generation solutions: HOS (Hospital Operating System) 2.0 for hospitals and CMOS (City Medical Operating System) 2.0 for smart city healthcare, thereby accelerating IT infrastructure development in both hospital and regional healthcare settings.

“Medicine as Methodology” is a systematic framework proposed by DHC Mediway, distilled from over 20 years of experience in Healthcare IT (HIT) development and a deep exploration of current industry demands. At the conference, Han Shibin, Chairman and CEO of DHC Mediway, summarized its core tenets into three points:

First, centered on different root directories, the methodology distills approaches for implementing data-driven governance across the six major factors of production. Second, focusing on the three elements of factors, roles, and tasks, it outlines methods for achieving data-driven governance at the finest granularity of business processes. Finally, revolving around the three dimensions of “governance, product solutions, and consulting,” it specifies concrete pathways for carrying out data-driven governance across all business domains and processes, IT twin representation, and business consulting. Among these, the first two serve as guiding principles for data-driven governance, while the third serves as the guiding principle for HOS/CMOS delivery.

The commonality among the three cores lies in “datafication.” In the vision of DHC Mediway, data serves not only as a factor of production and the operational cornerstone for various institutions, but also as a management tool capable of quantifying the level of business intelligence across these institutions.

Therefore, Han Shibin particularly affirmed the value of hospital governance in his speech. He stated, “Data elements and process data at the finest granularity are the necessary and sufficient conditions for realizing smart hospitals and urban smart healthcare, much like the tens of billions of parameters are to ChatGPT.”

It is important to note that whether for unlocking the management value of hospital-wide medical data or for standardizing and optimizing specific business processes, hospitals must break down data silos between various subsystems and build a middle platform capable of aggregating data across the entire institution. They can then leverage intelligent decision-making tools to manage and analyze the diverse data within this middle platform. The Digital Intelligence Platform iBDP and the Business Twin and Decision Support Platform DTS, recently launched by DHC Mediway, are designed precisely to help decision-makers establish such capabilities.

Implementing “Medicine as a Methodology” requires an underlying application architecture that is open, shared, decoupled, and intelligent. In response to this need, the iBDP (Intelligent Digital Platform), a next-generation digital support platform for smart hospitals and urban smart healthcare, has emerged.

Han Shibin stated at the conference, “iBDP is defined as an enterprise-level IT system’s data middle platform. It adopts entirely new open technologies and system architecture, featuring multi-tenancy, multi-business support, microservices, and distributed capabilities, thereby providing unified technical and data support across various domains.”

Meanwhile, iBDP also serves as a development platform, providing a unified application integration and runtime environment. It comprises an application support platform, data middle platform, AI platform, knowledge middle platform, and application platform.

Furthermore, iBDP provides a comprehensive enablement framework, offering external access to framework standards, public components, open APIs, data standards, and open-source algorithms, thereby possessing the capability to integrate with diverse IT systems.

Currently, iBDP offers “1+N” digital intelligence capabilities. The “1” refers to an open and comprehensive enablement system provided by iBDP, which includes more than 10 development framework standards, over 100 open APIs, 50+ generic components, 20+ data standards, and 10+ categories of medical algorithms. The “N” denotes that iBDP comprises multiple platforms, such as the application support platform, data middle platform, knowledge middle platform, AI middle platform, unified resource management platform, unified file management platform, and IoT platform.

Through its open and comprehensive enablement system, iBDP can connect all pan-IT systems, providing diverse digital-intelligence capabilities to support the development of smart hospitals and urban smart healthcare.

Business Twin and Decision Platform (DTS) serves as the core foundation of the Mediway methodology. DTS is a platform that digitizes all enterprise-level production factors and business processes of hospitals into their most granular data units, and a product that concretizes IT governance efforts.

Following the digitalization of production factors and business processes, hospitals can restructure their configuration systems based on DTS global control by reorganizing and designing risk-based permission allocation functions. Meanwhile, they can decompose regulatory rules according to roles, tasks, and business workflows, establishing a tightly coupled logical relationship between these rules and IT systems. This enables different managers to monitor rule execution in real time, thereby facilitating the analysis, restructuring, and optimization of process application effectiveness, ultimately achieving “optimal decision-making.”

For example, the DHC Mediway Electronic Medical Record (EMR) Grading Regulatory System was developed based on this functionality, enabling real-time monitoring of the actual implementation status of most EMR grading indicators within a hospital.

The current DTS has built-in over 400 business domains, nearly 1,000 core process terms, and close to 5,000 operational tasks, along with more than 270 preconfigured recommended processes. This provides hospitals with insight capabilities based on “industry benchmarks” for reviewing and assessing their own processes. Through in-depth parameter configuration, DTS can match processes across various scenarios according to the hospital’s actual needs, thereby offering decision support for business governance and process optimization.

To make hospital management and operations more transparent, precise, and controllable, DHC Mediway launched the first generation of HOS and CMOS in 2020, which garnered significant attention within the industry. In just three years, HOS and CMOS have been iterated to version 2.0. The new version not only enriches business modules but also places substantial emphasis on the “Personal Portal,” effectively enhancing the problem-solving capability and usability of the work interface, while further strengthening AI empowerment.

HOS 2.0’s clinical workstation is also equipped with intelligent features. For instance, DHC Mediway has integrated closed-loop AI capabilities—encompassing perception, analysis, and decision-making—into certain business processes.

Leveraging the natural language processing (NLP) and clinical decision support system (CDSS) technologies developed over many years by DHC Mediway, HOS can now provide real-time alerts to physicians regarding deficiencies in the medical records they are documenting, highlighting areas that require correction or further confirmation. The introduction of this feature enables auxiliary measures for ensuring medical quality to be integrated throughout the entire clinical diagnosis and treatment process.

Another notable change appears in the user interface. The new version of the clinical workstation supports dual monitors and 21:9 ultrawide screens. Through multi-screen collaboration, relevant information of interest to healthcare professionals is displayed as comprehensively as possible on a single plane, thereby enhancing their decision-making efficiency and workflow productivity.

Furthermore, to assist hospitals in building systematic engineering projects with regional personalization and sustainability, DHC Mediway pioneered the “Value Subscription” business model in the industry as early as 2020. This approach ensures that the process of continuous improvement is implemented through a viable business model, thereby addressing the inherent drawbacks of traditional business models. Under this model, users can choose to pay annual service fees, while DHC Mediway provides clients with its “1-5-1” value-added services, including upgrades, interface integration, localization, new requirements, new business processes, on-site technical support, and more.

Having listened to the entire conference, the most immediate impression left by DHC Mediway is that the company aims to help hospitals move beyond the construction logic of “promoting development through evaluation,” initiating proactive development driven by medical data, and empowering clinical practice, operations, scientific research, and even health management.

After all, only when hospitals recognize the value of management and actively engage in it—adopting a hospital-wide perspective to coordinate the needs of enterprises, departments, and physicians for personalized medical IT development—can they maximize the realization of informatization, digitalization, and intelligent transformation.

At the conclusion of the main forum, the HOS Hospital Alliance—established by DHC Mediway in collaboration with Peking University First Hospital, The University of Hong Kong-Shenzhen Hospital, The First Affiliated Hospital of Chongqing Medical University, and more than 30 other Grade A tertiary hospitals—aims to further uncover value through collaboration while continuously optimizing its systems alongside the provision of ongoing services.

Together with numerous hospital peers, DHC Mediway will surely continue to innovate, leveraging a “methodology”-driven mindset to chart the new direction for the development of healthcare IT in the next decade.