MAID – Multi Agent for the Integration of Data

 

Vieira-Marques P.^*, Cruz-Correia R.^*;^**, Costa P.^*, Palhares E.^*, Ferreira A.^*, Costa-Pereira A.^*;^**

 

pmarques@med.up.pt, rcorreia@med.up.pt, pcosta@med.up.pt, ernesto@med.up.pt, amlaf@med.up.pt, altamiro@med.up.pt

 

Abstract. Non-existence of a global overview or integration awareness leads to large and generalized heterogeneity of applications and technological approaches. Development of isolated systems has a serious and disruptive impact on daily practice and on clinical economic management. In this paper we describe a multi-agent system for the integration of heterogeneous clinical data sources and present the latest results originating from its use during the last year. The system aims to address several issues concerning the Portuguese healthcare information systems reality where it is common to find the lack of global strategy and planning related to the storage and management of patient’s data. 814.000 reports were integrated from nine departmental applications during 2005. Around 500 doctors use the system per month. Our multi-agent approach has an independent and collaborative profile. It is designed to tackle, in a secure way, problems originating from existing systems heterogeneity and dynamic data production.

Keywords: electronic health record; computer agents; integration and interoperability

 

Texto completo disponível apenas em PDF.

Full text only available in PDF format.

 

References

Abelha, A. M., Machado J., Alves, V,Neves, J.(2004) Health data management in the medical arena. In WSEAS Transactions on Computers. ISSN 1109-2750. 3:6.        [ Links ]

Bellifemine F, Poggi A, Rimassa G. (1999) Jade a fipa-compliant agent framework. In PAAM 99, 97–108.

Berg M. (2001). Implementing information systems in health care organizations: myths and challenges. Int J Med Inf, 64(2-3): 143–156.

Ferreira A, Cruz-Correia R, Antunes L, Palhares E, Marques P, Costa P, Costa-Pereira A .(2004). Integrity for electronic patient record reports. CBMS'04; 4-9.

Ferreira A., Correia R., Antunes L., Oliveira-Palhares E., Farinha P., Costa-Pereira A. (2005). How to start modelling access control in a healthcare organization. Proceedings of the 10th International Symposium for Health Information Management Research.

FIPA (2000). Agent management specification. Technical report, Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents.

Halamka JD, Osterland C, Safran C. (1999) Careweb, a web-based medical record for an integrated health care delivery system. Int J Med Inform, 54(1): 1–8.

Lenz R, Kuhn KA. (2001) Intranet meets hospital information systems: the solution to the integration problem? Methods Inf Med, 40(2): 99–105.

Malamateniou F, Vassilacopoulos G. (2003). An implementation of a virtual patient record using web services. Stud Health Technol Inform, 95.

Moreno A, Nealon J. (2003). Agent-based applications in health care. In Applications of Software Agent Technology in the Health Care Domain, Whitestein Series in Software Agent Technologies, 3–18.

NWGCS - Network working group of Cisco Systems (1999).US Secure Hash Algorithm 1 (SHA1). RFC 3174. Available at ftp://ftp-rfc-editor.org/in-notes/rfc2246.txt.

Oliveira I. C., Belo O.; Cunha J. P. (2002) iPOINTER: Um sistema multiagente para a integração de fontes de dados clínicos em ambientes hospitalares. Procedings CAPSI 2002.

Schmitt KF, Wofford DA. (2002). Financial analysis projects clear returns from electronic medical records. Healthc Financ Manage, 56(1): 52–7.

Weiss G. (1999). Multi-agent Systems – A modern approach to distributed Artificial Intelligence. MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Wyatt JC. (1995). Hospital information management: the need for clinical leadership. BMJ, 311: 175–8.

 

^* Biostatistical and Medical Informatics Department, Faculty of Medicine, University of Porto

^** Center for Research in Health Information Systems and Technologies – CINTESIS, Faculty of Medicine of University of Porto