Agents Working on the Integration of Heterogeneous Information Sources in Distributed Healthcare Environments

摘要

Hospital information infrastructures integrate today complex mosaics of heterogeneous systems, often dependent on legacy systems. The integration of disparate information sources in healthcare in an essential effort since physicans, and other hospital personnel, use to analyze and combine data provided by different sources distributed along the hospital facilities. Day-after-day their needs for effective means and tools to support such integration of data increase significantly. In order to fulfill such requirements we designed and developed an extensible multi-agent system that physicians may use to access multiple medical data sources available at the hospital, in a transparent way. This paper presents an overall description of the system giving special attention to its architecture and community of software agnets. The agents were specially planned for clinical information gathering, cleaning, integration and presentation in healthcare environments.