A framework for building cooperative software agents in medical applications

Exploiting the information technology may have a great impact on improving cooperation and interoperability among the different professionals taking p art to the process of delivering health care services. New paradigms are th erefore being devised considering software systems as autonomous agents abl e to help professionals in accomplishing their duties. To this aim those sy stems should encapsulate the skills for solving a given set of tasks and po ssess the social ability to cooperate in order to fetch the required inform ation and knowledge. This paper illustrates a methodology facilitating the development of interoperable intelligent software agents for medical applic ations and proposes a generic computational model for implementing them. Th at model may be specialized in order to support all the different informati on and knowledge related requirements of a Hospital Information System. The architecture is being tested for implementing a prototype system able to c oordinate the joint efforts of the professionals involved in managing patie nts affected by Acute Myeloid Leukemia. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.