Agent-Based Health Care Systems

In this paper we introduce the main issues related to the deployment of agent-based systems in health care. First, we comment on the characteristics of health care problems and we argue that multi-agent systems are a good choice to tackle problems with these features. This belief is supported with a number of exemplar applications of agent-based systems in medical domains. We also discuss several lines of research that have to be covered before multiagent systems can be successfully deployed in real health care settings. We conclude that multi-agent systems do have an increasingly important role to play in health care domains, because they significantly enhance our ability to model, design and build complex, distributed health care software systems.