Multi-agent based healthcare for the affordable and accessible health consultancy services-Kenya

Abstract

The health sector is an enormous environment characterized by its shared, distributed decisional aspect, its management of care, requiring a communication and a complex coordination of the various medical departments, medical staffand patients. The appropriate use of available information, knowledge and communication technologies can make a significant contribution towards achieving a sustainable health system and adoption of semantically interoperable health information systems. Healthcare sector in Kenya is faced with many problems such as inadequate medical expertise, poor infrastructure and coordination amongst the staff. Currently, the information systems in hospitals are not able to deal with the heterogeneous problems such as coordination, cooperation and communication between all actors and different services which are not adequately conducted. Incorporating Multi-agent Technologies and expert systems can provide better healthcare than the traditional medical system. Multi-agent systems will employ multiple agents to perform distinct tasks and operations in different capacities of a human agent. Their potential is to extract out meaningful relationship with a data set that can be used in diagnosis, treatment and predicting outcome in many clinical scenarios. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to analyze the requirements for Multi-agent based healthcare system for affordable and accessible health care consultancy services. This will focus on the representation of a guideline in form of expression, knowledge type, maintenance, local adaptation which will involve knowledge acquisition process directly from domain experts. The study will employ design science research. This will provide the specifications for the multi-agent based health care consultancy services that will be of benefit to the government, patients and other different stakeholder in provision of affordable and accessible health care service.