A First Approach for a Regional Wide VEPR

Patients visit multiple health institutions and leave a trail of information scattered around hospitals, healthcare centres and laboratories. Information availability is of major importance in healthcare delivery. Most of the Electronic Patient Record systems are unarticulated and usually address only the specificities of a single medical specialty. Virtual Electronic Patient Records such as MAID (Multi Agent system for the Integration of Data) system provide for the necessary means for intra-institutions departmental information integration. In this paper is presented a mobile agent based extension to the agent based MAID system in order to enable inter-institution patient data integration. This system was designed as a MAID extension with additional patient data integration features. In order to accomplish this, modules for external data discovery and collection where developed using mobile agents. Data collection activities are trigged by scheduled clinical events. The system is intended to enhance an existing institutional system taking it beyond the institutional barrier providing health professionals with a more complete patient clinical history. -