Abstract:
Managing patients in a shared-care context is a knowledge-intensive activity. To support
cooperative work in medical care, computer technology should both augment the capabilities
of individual specialists and enhance their ability of interacting with each other
and with computational resources. Thus, a major shift is needed from centralized first
generation health-care information systems to distributed environments composed of
several interconnected agents, cooperating in maintaining a full track of the patient
clinical history and supporting health-care providers in all the phases of the patient-management
process. This paper outlines a general methodology to make architectural choices while
designing or integrating new software components into a distributed health-care information
system. A particular stress is laid on the specification of shared conceptual models,
or ontologies, providing agents committing to them with the common semantic foundation required
for effective interoperation.
Keywords:
Agents - Ontology - Distributed Health-care
