An AI-based approach to support communication in health care organizations

Abstract

The increasing pressure on health care organizations to ensure efficiency and cost-effectiveness, balancing quality of care and cost containment, will drive them towards a more effective knowledge management. An appropriate information system will enable organizations to store, retrieve and apply all collective experience and know-how of its members, and to share it with other cooperating organizations. Information and communication technology provides effective tools for designing health care information systems and for supporting inter-organization communication. In this paper an organization is modeled starting from enterprise ontology and communication is supported through a KQML message-based representation; a conversation protocol explicitly defines cooperation modalities among communities of practice. A prototype of a communication broker has been designed and developed to assist health care professionals in scheduling activities within or across organizations; its implementation is based on the interchangeability between communication and computation tasks.