Towards Multi-Agent Health Information Systems

One of the key challenges in the healthcare sector is to adapt Health Information Systems to requirements coming from changing societies. In recent years, governments and international healthcare organizations defined a series of requirements for new generation Health Information Systems: they have to preserve past investments on legacy systems, but must also integrate new technologies, include the patient among their users, and ensure that clinical information are available at all times, even in places far from where information are physically stored. This paper proposes a multi agent-oriented architecture for Health Information Systems, which uses international standards for communication and management of clinical documents. The architecture tries to effectively model a generic healthcare organization, and aims at being easily extensible and adaptable to the particularities of specific healthcare systems. The authors present two experimental scenarios to test the proposed multi-agent health information system. In the first, they show how to model a specific use case, a radiology workflow, using agents and well-known standards; in the second one the authors demonstrate how a mobile application can use the services provided by the agents to support the medical staff in an emergency situation.