Paper Info
Title
Using Semantic Components to Represent Dynamics of an Interdisciplinary Healthcare Team in a Multi-Agent Decision Support System.
Abstract
In healthcare organizations, clinical workflows are executed by interdisciplinary healthcare teams (IHTs) that operate in ways that are difficult to manage. Responding to a need to support such teams, we designed and developed the MET4 multi-agent system that allows IHTs to manage patients according to presentation-specific clinical workflows. In this paper, we describe a significant extension of the MET4 system that allows for supporting rich team dynamics (understood as team formation, management and task-practitioner allocation), including selection and maintenance of the most responsible physician and more complex rules of selecting practitioners for the workflow tasks. In order to develop this extension, we introduced three semantic components: (1) a revised ontology describing concepts and relations pertinent to IHTs, workflows, and managed patients, (2) a set of behavioral rules describing the team dynamics, and (3) an instance base that stores facts corresponding to instances of concepts from the ontology and to relations between these instances. The semantic components are represented in first-order logic and they can be automatically processed using theorem proving and model finding techniques. We employ these techniques to find models that correspond to specific decisions controlling the dynamics of IHT. In the paper, we present the design of extended MET4 with a special focus on the new semantic components. We then describe its proof-of-concept implementation using the WADE multi-agent platform and the Z3 solver (theorem prover/model finder). We illustrate the main ideas discussed in the paper with a clinical scenario of an IHT managing a patient with chronic kidney disease.
Year
DOI
Venue
2016
10.1007/s10916-015-0375-3
Journal of Medical Systems
Keywords
Field
DocType
Interdisciplinary healthcare team, Clinical workflow, Multi-agent system, First-order logic, Ontology
Ontology,Data mining,Computer science,Automated theorem proving,Expert system,Decision support system,Multi-agent system,First-order logic,Workflow,Semantics
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
40
2
1573-689X
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
4
0.45
17
Authors
7
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Szymon Wilk146140.94
Mounira Kezadri-Hamiaz291.29
Daniela Rosu383.22
Craig E. Kuziemsky420338.37
Wojtek Michalowski526641.48
Daniel Amyot61709140.89
Marc Carrier7122.68