Abstract

While being a very important field both from a social and economic perspective, the healthcare domain lacks supporting IT systems and services that really fit the process schemes used in this domain, with one very important one being collaboration. This paper describes our approach to healthcare services utilizing software agents which in turn employ user-centric collaboration. This approach is grounded on the properties of the healthcare domain as a whole and key prerequisites defined by related research. We introduce the use of software agents in our healthcare system SHA as to implement the domain goals by decomposition and collaborative recomposition. Using two scenarios we show that collaborative user-centric healthcare services fit the structure of the underlying domain naturally, allowing a comprehensive, integrated solution, increasing service quality and adaptability and providing collaboration support for human users, especially medical experts.