Agent-oriented software engineering of distributed ehealth systems

Abstract

Development of distributed ehealth systems is increasingly becoming a common necessity to work across organisations to provide efficient services. This requires healthcare information to be accessible, under appropriate safeguards, for research or healthcare. However, the progress relies on the interoperability of local healthcare software, and is often hampered by ad hoc development methods leading to closed systems with a multitude of protocols, terminologies, and design approaches. The ehealth domain, by requirements, includes autonomous organisations and individuals, e.g. patients and doctors, which would make AOSE a good approach to developing systems that are potentially more open yet retain more local control and autonomy. The paper presents the use of AOSE to develop a particular distributed ehealth system, IDEA, and evaluates its suitability to develop such systems in general. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.