eHealth Strategies for the Continuum of Care  

Healthcare Example

Healthcare Example
Agents Working Together

Introduction
Connection Technologies
Intelligent Agents
Wireless Devices
Patient Encounter
Contact Information


Managing patients through the continuum of care

 

Healthcare Example

How agent technology might be used in healthcare has been studied and written about for more than a decade. The following is an abstract from a research paper that describes agents managing patients through the continuum of care.

Abstract: The Patient Advocate is designed to be an intelligent assistant for patient-centered health care. Residing on a home computer or special-purpose device and operating within an extended health-care information network, the Patient Advocate will extend medical expertise into the outpatient setting. It will have remote access to the patient's medical record, an understanding of the patient's health status and history, and a model of the patient's interest in health-related issues, preferences for modes and contents of interaction, etc. The Patient Advocate is being designed to provide three kinds of functions. First, it will assist the patient in managing continuing ambulatory conditions, for example chronic problems such as diabetes, special normal conditions such as prenatal care, and wellness issues such as diet, exercise, and stress. Second, it will provide health-related information by allowing the patient to interact with the on-line health-care information network and scan media resources to suggest information of interest. Third, it will act as a remote triage point for clinical services by coordinating patient-relevant information such as reminding the patient when a visit to the clinic is indicated. We describe a prototype of the Patient Advocate that is designed to support obstetrics patients at risk of gestational diabetes. It is written in Java and is therefore Internet accessible.

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