A Technological Solution to Provide Integrated and Process-Oriented Care Services in Healthcare Organizations

Abstract

Integrated health services are characterized by a high degree of collaboration and communication among health professionals, as well as a merge of political, administrative, and technical actions, which can allow the sharing of information among healthcare team members (physicians, nurses, managers, and other stakeholders) related to patient care, and access to hospital infrastructure and technology, within a patient-centered approach. In this paper, we propose a technological solution based on software agents, which allows supporting the management of collaborative processes in environments of dynamic collaborative networks. We present a methodology for coordinating healthcare services through collaborative processes to enable organizations providing integrated care services and continuous process improvements. This methodology includes methods based on Model-Driven Development, which enable the generation of executable process models and the code of the process-oriented agents, derived from conceptual models of collaborative processes. The methodology and methods are implemented and automated by software agents that enable the generation of the technological solution, at run-time on the platform. Furthermore, we propose an agent-based platform that enables organizations to negotiate collaboration agreements in electronic format to establish collaborative networks, as well as a definition of the collaborative processes to be executed. In this way, the proposed agent-based platform allows collaborations among heterogeneous and autonomous healthcare organizations focusing on the process-oriented integration, enabling us to provide integrated healthcare services.