Start Date
12-17-2013
Description
The health sector is a central domain in every economy. It is challenged by progressing costs and funding issues. Hospitals play a major role for the examination and treatment of patients. The sequence how patients are assigned to hospital units determines the quality of treatment, the resource utilization, as well as the patients’ overall treatment time. Thus, efficient scheduling of patients in hospitals is crucial. Current approaches disregard the decentral organization in hospitals and neglect the varying pathway of patients since they often focus on one single unit solely. We propose an agent-based coordination mechanism that overcomes these limitations. Patients and hospital resources are modeled as autonomous software agents which follow their own objectives. This reflects the decentralized structure in hospitals. Agents are coordinated by a distributed mechanism where software agents improve their situation through negotiations which moves towards an overall pareto-optimum. We show promising evaluations based on experiments.
Recommended Citation
Paulussen, Torsten; Heinzl, Armin; and Becker, Christian, "Multi-Agent Based Information Systems For Patient Coordination in Hospitals" (2013). ICIS 2013 Proceedings. 2.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/icis2013/proceedings/HealthcareIS/2
Multi-Agent Based Information Systems For Patient Coordination in Hospitals
The health sector is a central domain in every economy. It is challenged by progressing costs and funding issues. Hospitals play a major role for the examination and treatment of patients. The sequence how patients are assigned to hospital units determines the quality of treatment, the resource utilization, as well as the patients’ overall treatment time. Thus, efficient scheduling of patients in hospitals is crucial. Current approaches disregard the decentral organization in hospitals and neglect the varying pathway of patients since they often focus on one single unit solely. We propose an agent-based coordination mechanism that overcomes these limitations. Patients and hospital resources are modeled as autonomous software agents which follow their own objectives. This reflects the decentralized structure in hospitals. Agents are coordinated by a distributed mechanism where software agents improve their situation through negotiations which moves towards an overall pareto-optimum. We show promising evaluations based on experiments.