Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
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How to find out which institutions the patient has visited without relying in their
volatile memory?
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How to deal with network disruptions, high latencies or complex institutional legacy
systems interfacing?
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How to deal with resistance to share data among institutions?
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How to secure the access to stored information in a way that only authorized staff
can access it?
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How to secure the data while agents are roaming through the network?
In order to answer these questions we must firstly provide effective and reliable search
and interface methods, as well as an adaptive and fault tolerant system behavior. These
features, along with strong security enforcement mechanisms, would increase system
confidence and solve most of the above questions.
3.2
System
MedIGS is an evolution of current medical information gathering systems, overcoming
the main issues described before. This proposal goes far beyond others, such as [42],
addressing issues like inter-institution patient health data integration, unavailable on-
line remote data retrieval, or secure data access and transportation. Two mainstays
support the proposal: mobile agents and agent-driven security. MedIGS is based on
the widely used multi-agent platform JADE [3], which is compliant with the IEEE-
FIPA agent specifications, together with the JADE Inter-Platform Mobility Service [7]
add-on, which allows the agents to move between different platforms. This platform
provides the system with the necessary means for inter-institution data discovery, trans-
port, and integration. Information gathering actions will be triggered by consultation
appointments, and agents will direct their efforts in order to make patient clinical his-
tory available as complete as possible for that event. Integration efforts will be directed
to clinical documents and not to the data themselves.
In terms of computer structures there are no major requirements besides the need for
an agent platform where the broker agent resides and where mobile agents can move.
Regarding existing procedures there is no need for changes on the normal execution of
the central system, it is just necessary to have a specific interface behavior that can be
executed by the mobile agent to provide for a document retrieval interface from which
document references can be retrieved. This interface is in charge of the dynamic report
generation with existing data on the fly.
3.2.1 Architecture
The MedIGS proposal defines a common set of agents that exist in all systems. These
agents are devoted to event management, data discovery, and data collection. Actions
are triggered by scheduled clinical episodes (interventions, outpatient visits) or upon
user request. There are five agents present in each system:
- Mobile Scheduler (MS):
This is the agent in charge of managing scheduled events
and launching mobile agent instances that will go in search of patient data
references.
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