Patient-Centred Laboratory Validation Using Software Agents

Guidelines are self-contained documents which healthcare professionals reference to obtain knowledge about a specific condition or process. They interface with these documents and apply known facts about specific patients to gain useful supportive information to aid in developing a diagnosis or manage a condition. To automate this process a series of Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) and workflow processes are constructed using the contents of these documents in order to manage the validation flow of a patient sample. These processes decompose the guidelines into workflow plans, which are then called using condition triggers controlled by a centralised management engine. The software BDI agent offers an alternative dynamic which more closely matches the modus operandi of narrative based medical guidelines. An agent’s beliefs capture information attributes, plans capture the deliberative and action attributes, and desire captures the motivational attributes of the guideline in a self-contained autonomous software module. Agents acting on behalf of guidelines which overlap and interweave in similar domains can collaborate and coordinate in a loosely coupled fashion without the need for an all encompassing centralised plan

Communication of Medical Information Using Agents

Agents are self-contained software entities which act faithfully and autonomously on behalf of a body of knowledge. They can operate in a standalone capacity, or as part of a social group collaborating and coordinating activities with other software agents. To access their knowledge, agents are interfaced with using message passing communication. The principle behind medical communications is to provide a means for exchanging information and knowledge from one computerised location to another, whilst preserving its true meaning and understanding between the listener and sender. Agent communication is similar to medical communications, but must provide an additional framework element to allow agents to interact at a social and operational level. Social aspects relate to agents collaborating on shared objectives, and operational aspects relate to coordination of tasks between the loosely coupled agents working as part of a group. Medical communications focus on data exchanges specific to the medical domain, while agent communication was designed for a much broader audience. Therefore, it is essential to verify if agent communications can support standard medical data exchanges. This paper investigates current forms of agent based communications and demonstrates they can support medical communication, yet retain their social and interaction information exchange functionality

Software Agents Representing Medical Guidelines.

Guidelines are self-contained documents which healthcare professionals reference to obtain specific disease or medical condition knowledge for a particular population cohort. They view these documents and apply known facts about their patients to access useful supportive information to aid in developing a diagnosis or manage a condition. Traditional CIG models decompose these guidelines into workflow plans, which are then called using certain motivational trigger conditions controlled by a centralised management engine. Therefore, CIG guidelines are not self-contained documents, which specialise in a particular condition or disease, but are effectively a list of workflow plans, which are called and used when the patient information is available. The software BDI agent offers an alternative approach which more closely matches the modus operandi of narrative based medical guidelines. An agent?s beliefs capture information attributes, plans capture the deliberative and action attributes, and desire captures the motivational attributes of the guideline in a self-contained autonomous software module. This synergy between the narrative guideline and the BDI agent offers an improved solution for computerising medical guidelines when compared to the CIG approach

Sharing health-care records over the Internet

peer-reviewedPresents a novel approach to sharing electronic health-care records that leverages the Internet and the World Wide Web, developed as part of two European Commission-funded projects, Synapses and SynEx. The approach provides an integrated view of patient data from heterogeneous, distributed information systems and presents it to users electronically. Synapses and SynEx illustrate a generic approach in applying Internet technologies for viewing shared records, integrated with existing health computing environments. Prototypes have been validated in a variety of clinical domains and health-care settings

Using XML to network distributed analytical instruments: back to the future?

There has been a paradigm shift in medical informatics standards in recent years from the message-oriented approach to a more distributed systems approach. However, despite all the early promise of distributed applications, they haven\u27t been widely adopted in the health domain for various reasons. As a result, despite an increasing need for a standardised distributed solution for analytical laboratory instruments, many implementers of instrument interfaces are still using proprietary serial interfaces which do not support distribution. The emergence of the eXtended Markup Language (XML) specification in 1998 revived the fortunes of the messaged oriented methodology. This paper presents a partial return to the message based solution. The first section describes the syntax of XML and its impact in various healthcare areas. The next part outlines and compares the different of \u27A standard specification for transferring information between clinical instruments and computer systems (ASTM 1394-91) and its XML-compliant counterpart, while the third part presents one possible use of the XML version in a detailed and practicel medical scenario. A provisional Document Type Definitition (DTD) as well as an example of the resulting ASTM 1394-91/XML will be given in the last section

Framework and architecture for the management of event-condition-action (ECA) rule-based clinical protocols

peer-reviewedComputer-based support for the incorporation of clinical practice guidelines and protocol into daily practice has recently attracted a lot of research interest within the healthcare informatics area. The aim is not only to provide support for the flexible specification and execution of clinical guidelines or protocols but also the dynamic management of these guidelines or protocols. This paper presents a framework and architecture for the management of clinical protocols whose specification and execution models are based on the event-condition-action (ECA) rule paradigm