HITO – A Health IT Ontology

The goal of this project is to develop a Health IT Ontology (HITO) that allows systematically describing application systems and software products in health IT. Our motivation is that information management professionals have a strong need to share and compare knowledge about health IT in several situations. These situations are, among others, to describe the components of a health information system as part of its strategic or operational management, to select a new software product, to learn about available evidence regarding an application, or to hire or train health IT specialists. To reach our objectives, we will combine an agile research approach and a case-based approach as well as a structured approach to taxonomy development. This project builds on our earlier research that focused on concepts and terminology related to health information systems.

The terminology to describe digital health interventions is not well defined, making searching for information on digital health interventions or comparing digital health interventions difficult for researchers and practitioners. The HITO projects aimed to develop a digital health ontology to describe the focus and functionality of application systems and software products in health care to support their management and evaluation. Within five use cases, the HITO ontology was developed. HITO is modeled and published using semantic web technologies. Due to HITO's availability as linked open data, barrier-free access and free use of HITO are facilitated. HITO provides a first framework for describing software products. HITO can be used by researchers who publish studies on digital health interventions or by developers and users who need to describe software products in a more structured way by using a standardized and openly available terminology. HITO helps advance a more uniform terminology within health informatics as a scientific discipline.