Software agents in clinical workflow, clinical guidelines and clinical trial medicine

Abstract

Software agents can be used to assist with or even automate many parts of a business process or workflow. In this paper we describe what needs to be done to use software agents to assist the oncology trial workflow. The most pressing problem is simply getting the existing data in a machine readable format. To this end we propose the Clinical Knowledge Markup Language for representing all this information. Agents can then be used for a multitude of tasks such as identifying patients that are eligible for a given trial, suggesting treatment based on past trials and automating data collection. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2012.