title: Automated monitoring of medical protocols: a secure and distributed architecture.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Science, University de Lleida, Jaume II 69, E-25001 Lleida, Spain. tracy@eup.udl.es
authors.forename: T
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Alsinet
authors.forename: C
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Ansótegui
authors.forename: R
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Béjar
authors.forename: C
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Fernández
authors.forename: F
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Manyà
mesh_terms: D001185:Artificial Intelligence; D001331:Automation; D002985:Clinical Protocols; D003142:Communication; D016494:Computer Security; D003199:Computer Systems; D006751:Hospital Information Systems; D006801:Humans