Sharing Medical Information by Means of Using Intelligent Agents and Cloud Computing

Abstract

From birth to death, every human being leaves a long medical history consisting of laboratory exams, records of medical consultations, records, and hospitalizations, as well as any other important information that affects the patient's health. These are known today as Electronic Health Records (EHR) or Electronic Medical Records (EMR). However, because a person's lifestyle and health are continuously changing, most of this medical information is distributed among different institutions, cities, and even countries where the specific processes were undertaken, in possession of health insurance providers or even hidden inside a drawer of the patient's home. Therefore, aiming to enhance the availability of improved medical services at reduced costs, modern information technology is being increasingly used in the healthcare sector. Researchers, developers, and companies have made efforts to develop mobile, Web, desktop, and enterprise e-health applications raising the importance of interoperability and data exchange between e-health applications and Health Information Systems (HIS). In this regard, Cloud Computing (CC) promises low cost, high scalability, availability, and disaster recoverability, which can be a natural solution for some of the problems faced in storing and analyzing EMRs. However, CC, which is mainly defined to address the use of scalable and often virtualized resources, is still evolving. New, specific collaboration models among service providers are needed for enabling effective service collaboration, allowing the process of serving consumers to be more efficient. In this chapter, the current state and trends of CC in healthcare are presented as well as a detailed collaboration model based on intelligent agents focusing on the EHR sharing subject. This model for enabling effective service in cloud systems is based on a recent research proposal related to defining a collaboration mechanism by means of Scout Movement. The chapter also includes details on the way in which services and service providers are clearly defined in this particular system.