Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
In order to illustrate the benefits that agent technology brings in the healthcare en-
vironment, in the following sections we describe in more detail two of the introduced
systems in which the authors have been closely participated at the design and imple-
mentation stages: HeCaSe2 and K4Care.
4 HeCaSe2
Healthcare Services release 2 (HeCaSe2) is a research prototype designed as a dis-
tributed multi-agent system that allows to simulate complex processes in a healthcare
organization [24]. HeCaSe2 proposes the inclusion of Clinical Guidelines (CG) with
Multi-Agent Systems in order to obtain a prototype that can be used in a real medical
environment to improve the current resource management.
The proposal defines an architecture of agents that emulates the behaviours of
medical partners in a medical centre. This infrastructure is used by practitioners to
execute CGs that describe sequences of steps to be performed over a patient in order
to treat a particular pathology. These CGs are generally promoted by governmental
institutions, but the practical implementation in real scenarios is difficult due to the
lack of interoperability of existing guideline-based execution engines [27]. The use of
agents aids to address this issue, allowing to build a flexible and modular application
that can be easily customised attending to the particular circumstances of the final
medical centre ( e.g., the use of a particular electronic health record), and that can
facilitate the coordination of activities between different medical centres.
4.1 HeCaSe2 Architecture
The proposed agent-based architecture includes different kinds of agents following
the organisational rules of a real healthcare institution (see Figure 2). Each agent acts
autonomously with its own knowledge and data. It is decentralised, as there is not any
central control node and the number of agents may be configured depending on the
specific structure of a healthcare organisation ( e.g. , doctors, departments, and devices
in a medical centre).
At the top of the architecture it is located the patient, who interacts with the system
through his User Agent (UA). This agent stores static data related to the user ( e.g.,
national health care number, name, address, and access information -login, password,
and keys-) and dynamic data (the timetable and the preferences of the user).
The Broker Agent (BA) is an agent that knows all the medical centres located in a
certain area. It maintains the information of all connected medical centres, and per-
mits the user to search a medical centre according to a criterion ( e.g., the centre of a
village, or a centre that has a particular department).
A Medical Centre Agent (MCA) controls and monitors the outsider accesses to the
agents that manage the information of a medical centre. A MCA monitors all of its
departments, represented by Department Agents (DAs), and a set of general services
linked to human or physical resources, represented by Service Agents (SAs) ( e.g., a
blood test service). Each department has a staff of several doctors, modelled through
Doctor Agents (DRAs), and offers more specific services, also modelled as SAs ( e.g. ,
a nurse that can take different observations in situ ). Both MCAs and DAs are aware of
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