Cooperative software agents for patient management

Managing patients in a shared-care context is a knowledge intensive activity. To support cooperative work in medical care, computer technology should either 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 Hospital 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. In this paper we describe a methodology for implementing a network of cooperating software agents aimed at improving the health care delivery process. Moreover, a preliminary computational prototype exploiting the proposed methodology is also illustrated.