Improving patient assistance and medical practices through intelligent agents

Abstract

This paper addresses the use of intelligent and autonomous agents in the context of an Health Care Unit. Indeed, heath care systems have to be understood in terms of a wide variety of heterogeneous, distributed and ubiquitous systems, speaking different languages, integrating medical equipment and being customized by different companies, which in turn were developed by people aiming at dif- ferent goals. Therefore, an architecture has been envisaged to sup- port the medical applications in terms of an agency for integration, diffusion and archiving of medical information and the Electronic Medical Record, a form of a web spider of an intelligent infor- mation processing system, its major subsystems, their functional roles, and the flow of information and control among them, with adjustable autonomy. With such systems, patient assistance will be more effective, faster and the quality of service will be improved (e.g., the available knowledge may be used for educational and training purposes).