A Multi-Agent Solution for the Interoperability Issue in Health Information Systems

To achieve high quality and efficiency standards, interoperability between different information systems in healthcare is strongly required. Distribution, high modularity, robustness are features of agent oriented architectures, making MultiAgent Systems (MAS) ideal for Health Information Systems (HIS), as the healthcare domain is characterized by system and data heterogeneity. This paper presents an agent oriented architecture to address this kind of issues, capable to access geographically distributed data to allow health professionals to retrieve/update any patient’s record efficiently and reliably. The proposed architecture is composed by three layers, to allow local data storage keeping clinical information available by authorized facilities and physicians. Furthermore MAS technology integrates with legacy systems, wrapping them with agents.