Agent-services and mobile agents for an integrated HCIS

Healthcare information systems (HCIS) are complex, heterogeneous, and spread out over multiple locations making their management and exploitation very onerous and lacking efficiency. Integration of these sub-systems seems necessary and needs a judicious choice of technologies and an adapted architecture. Significant benefits in terms of better economic costs and higher quality of care can be obtained by adopting good integration strategies and suitable technologies. This paper studies the importance of HCIS integration and proposes the design of MOBIFLEX, a generic architecture well suited for integrating HCIS. The architecture is a combination of mobile agents, static agents and agents-services. The aim of the combination of these new technologies is to ease flexible integration and exploitation of disparate HCIS sub-systems. As mobility is inherent to healthcare environments, the architecture is managed by mobile workflows and empowered by fault-tolerance mechanisms. Finally, technical solutions are proposed to implement the architecture in JADE platform enhanced with LEAP and JADEX.

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