A Semiotic Multi-Agent Modeling Approach for Clinical Pathway Management

Clinical pathway (CP) is the standard way to manage medical activities in order to improve the efficiency and minimize the cost of healthcare service. However current application of CPs can hardly adapt to the dynamic and complex clinical processes which involve the coordination of social agents in hospital. This paper focuses on developing a multi-agent modeling method to build up the system that can increase the execution efficiency of clinical pathway. In particular, we present a semiotic approach to analyze the requirement of clinical pathway. Furthermore we describe how the EDA (Epistemic, Deontic, and Axiological) agent and the negotiation model are realized and applied to support the clinical pathway management. Finally, the clinical pathway of breast cancer is presented to demonstrate our methods.