Automated monitoring of medical protocols: a secure and distributed architecture.

Full Abstract

The control of the right application of medical protocols is a key issue in hospital environments. For the automated monitoring of medical protocols, we need a domain-independent language for their representation and a fully, or semi, autonomous system that understands the protocols and supervises their application. In this paper we describe a specification language and a multi-agent system architecture for monitoring medical protocols. We model medical services in hospital environments as specialized domain agents and interpret a medical protocol as a negotiation process between agents. A medical service can be involved in multiple medical protocols, and so specialized domain agents are independent of negotiation processes and autonomous system agents perform monitoring tasks. We present the detailed architecture of the system agents and of an important domain agent, the database broker agent, that is responsible of obtaining relevant information about the clinical history of patients. We also describe how we tackle the problems of privacy, integrity and authentication during the process of exchanging information between agents.

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Author information

Author/s: Alsinet, T (T); Ansótegui, C (C); Béjar, R (R); Fernández, C (C); Manyà, F (F);

Affiliation: Department of Computer Science, University de Lleida, Jaume II 69, E-25001 Lleida, Spain. tracy@eup.udl.es

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Journal Article; Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

Journal: Artificial intelligence in medicine (Artif Intell Med), published in Netherlands. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2003-Mar; vol 27 (issue 3) : pp 367-92

Dates: Created 2003/04/01; Completed 2003/07/15; Revised 2006/11/15;

PMID: 12667743, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 11/6/2008)

Sourced from the National Library of Medicine. Abstract text and other information may be subject to copyright.

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