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Designing an Architectural Style for Dynamic Medical Cross-Organizational Workflow Management System: An Approach Based on Agents and Web Services

  • Patient Facing Systems
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Abstract

This paper shows how the combined use of agent and web services technologies can help to design an architectural style for dynamic medical Cross-Organizational Workflow (COW) management system. Medical COW aims at supporting the collaboration between several autonomous and possibly heterogeneous medical processes, distributed over different organizations (Hospitals, Clinic or laboratories). Dynamic medical COW refers to occasional cooperation between these health organizations, free of structural constraints, where the medical partners involved and their number are not pre-defined. More precisely, this paper proposes a new architecture style based on agents and web services technologies to deal with two key coordination issues of dynamic COW: medical partners finding and negotiation between them. It also proposes how the proposed architecture for dynamic medical COW management system can connect to a multi-agent system coupling the Clinical Decision Support System (CDSS) with Computerized Prescriber Order Entry (CPOE). The idea is to assist the health professionals such as doctors, nurses and pharmacists with decision making tasks, as determining diagnosis or patient data analysis without stopping their clinical processes in order to act in a coherent way and to give care to the patient.

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Conflict of interest

The author(s) declare(s) that there is no conflict of interests regarding the publication of this article.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Miracl Laboratory, ISIM/University of Sfax, Route de Tunis, km 10, BP 242, 3021, Sakeit Ezzit, Sfax, Tunisia

    Lotfi Bouzguenda

  2. Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Monastir, Rue Ibn Sina, 5000, Monastir, Tunisia

    Manel Turki

Authors
  1. Lotfi Bouzguenda
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  2. Manel Turki
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Correspondence to Lotfi Bouzguenda.

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Bouzguenda, L., Turki, M. Designing an Architectural Style for Dynamic Medical Cross-Organizational Workflow Management System: An Approach Based on Agents and Web Services. J Med Syst 38, 32 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-014-0032-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-014-0032-2

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