title: Chronic Heart Failure Follow-up Management Based on Agent Technology.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  Monitoring heart failure patients through continues assessment of sign and symptoms by information technology tools lead to large reduction in re-hospitalization. Agent technology is one of the strongest artificial intelligence areas; therefore, it can be expected to facilitate, accelerate, and improve health services especially in home care and telemedicine. The aim of this article is to provide an agent-based model for chronic heart failure (CHF) follow-up management.
  
  
  METHODS
  This research was performed in 2013-2014 to determine appropriate scenarios and the data required to monitor and follow-up CHF patients, and then an agent-based model was designed.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Agents in the proposed model perform the following tasks: medical data access, communication with other agents of the framework and intelligent data analysis, including medical data processing, reasoning, negotiation for decision-making, and learning capabilities.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  The proposed multi-agent system has ability to learn and thus improve itself. Implementation of this model with more and various interval times at a broader level could achieve better results. The proposed multi-agent system is no substitute for cardiologists, but it could assist them in decision-making.
authors.affiliation: Department of Health Information Management, Paramedical Faculty, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran.
authors.forename: Niloofar
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Mohammadzadeh
authors.affiliation: Department of Health Information Management, Paramedical Faculty, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran.
authors.forename: Reza
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Safdari
keywords: Artificial Intelligence; Health Information Systems; Heart Failure; Multi-agent Systems