Automated monitoring of medical protocols: a secure and distributed architecture

• Published in: Artificial intelligence in medicine Vol. 27; no. 3; pp. 367 - 392
• Main Authors: Alsinet, T., Ansótegui, C., Béjar, R., Fernández, C., Manyà, F.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Netherlands Elsevier B.V 01.03.2003
• Subjects: Agents; Artificial Intelligence; Automation; Clinical Protocols; Communication; Computer applications; Computer Security; Computer Systems; Distributed monitoring; Health care; Hospital Information Systems; Humans; Medical protocols; Multi-agent system architecture; Secure communication layer; Software; Specification and representation; Secure communication layer; Medical protocols; Specification and representation; Multi-agent system architecture; Distributed monitoring
• ISSN: 0933-3657; 1873-2860
• DOI: 10.1016/S0933-3657(03)00010-1

The control of the right application of medical protocols is a key issue in hospital environments. For the automated monitoring of medical protocols, we need a domain-independent language for their representation and a fully, or semi, autonomous system that understands the protocols and supervises their application. In this paper we describe a specification language and a multi-agent system architecture for monitoring medical protocols. We model medical services in hospital environments as specialized domain agents and interpret a medical protocol as a negotiation process between agents. A medical service can be involved in multiple medical protocols, and so specialized domain agents are independent of negotiation processes and autonomous system agents perform monitoring tasks. We present the detailed architecture of the system agents and of an important domain agent, the database broker agent, that is responsible of obtaining relevant information about the clinical history of patients. We also describe how we tackle the problems of privacy, integrity and authentication during the process of exchanging information between agents.