Cooperating agents implementing distributed patient management

Managing patients is a knowledge intensive activity requiring a high interoperability among the health care professionals involved. To support cooperative work in medical care, computer technology should therefore either augment the capabilities of individual specialists and enhance their ability of interacting with each other and with computational resources. However, despite the efforts spent in the Artificial Intelligence research field in the past years for developing innovative tools, there are still very few cases of systems which are proficiently used on a routinary basis for providing health care related services. One way to overcome those limitations is to redesign the set of software tools in order that they be more appropriated for an interoperable environment, and perhaps the most promising approach nowadays is based on the so called distributed computing paradigm applied to Artificial Intelligence. In this paper we describe a methodology for implementing a network of cooperating software agents aimed at improving the health care delivery process. Moreover, we will also illustrate some examples from a set of tools we are developing for evaluating that methodology.