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Chapter 3
Agent Technology and Healthcare: Possibilities,
Challenges and Examples of Application
David Sánchez, David Isern, and Antonio Moreno
Universitat Rovira i Virgili (URV)
Department of Computer Science and Mathematics
Intelligent Technologies for Advanced Knowledge Acquisition (ITAKA) Research Group
Avinguda Països Catalans, 26. 43007 Tarragona, Catalonia (Spain)
david.sanchez@urv.cat, david.isern@urv.cat,
antonio.moreno@urv.cat
Abstract.
Agent technology has emerged as a promising technology to develop
complex and distributed systems. They have been extensively applied in a wide
range of healthcare areas in the last 10 years. This chapter introduces the basic
aspects and properties of agents and multi-agent systems and argues their ade-
quacy to solve different kinds of problems in healthcare. It also describes
several healthcare areas in which this technology has been successfully applied,
introducing, in each case, some of the most relevant works. The explanation is
illustrated with a more detailed description of two agent-based healthcare appli-
cations in which the authors have been involved. One of them automates the
enactment of clinical guidelines by coordinating several healthcare entities of a
medical organization. The other is a Web-based knowledge-driven platform that
supports the execution of personalized Home Care services. The benefits that
agent technology brings to those approaches are commented and several lines of
future research are enounced.
1 Introduction
Healthcare is an area that affects very directly the life quality of all human beings. It
is a complex domain which usually involves lengthy procedures, in which a large
quantity of professionals with a wide range of expertise, knowledge, skills and abili-
ties (from family doctors to medical specialists, nurses, laboratory technicians or
social workers) have to co-ordinate efficiently their activities to provide the best pos-
sible care to patients. In this sense, the computerization of administrative and medical
assistance processes can help to improve the provision of care services, both from the
temporal, medical and economic points of view. However, healthcare is one of the
most difficult domains to automate due to its inherent complexity. The lack of stan-
dardization between healthcare organizations, the heterogeneous profiles of their
users, the reluctance of practitioners to use computerised systems, the enormous
amount of data to be handled and their variety of formats, the decentralisation of data
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