Software Agents Representing Medical Guidelines

Guidelines are self-contained documents which healthcare professionals reference to obtain specific disease or medical condition knowledge for a particular population cohort. They view these documents and apply known facts about their patients to access useful supportive information to aid in developing a diagnosis or manage a condition. Traditional CIG models decompose these guidelines into workflow plans, which are then called using certain motivational trigger conditions controlled by a centralised management engine. Therefore, CIG guidelines are not self-contained documents, which specialise in a particular condition or disease, but are effectively a list of workflow plans, which are called and used when the patient information is available. The software BDI agent offers an alternative approach which more closely matches the modus operandi of narrative based medical guidelines. An agent’s beliefs capture information attributes, plans capture the deliberative and action attributes, and desire captures the motivational attributes of the guideline in a self-contained autonomous software module. This synergy between the narrative guideline and the BDI agent offers an improved solution for computerising medical guidelines when compared to the CIG