Coordinating Emergency Medical Assistance
In this Chapter we propose an organization-based multi-agent application for emergency medical assistance (EMA). The application uses different Agreement Technologies (AT) to provide support to the entire process of out-of-hospital assistance to severe em
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Coordinating Emergency Medical Assistance Marin Lujak and Holger Billhardt
35.1 Introduction The domain of medical assistance in general, and of emergency situations in particular, includes many tasks that require flexible on-demand negotiation, initiation, coordination, information exchange and supervision among the different entities involved (e.g., ambulances, emergency centres, hospitals, patients, physicians, etc.). Furthermore, it is a domain in which the involved parties, especially patients and medical professionals, can benefit from the introduction of new informatic services. Services that aid in the process of getting medical help in case of a sudden disease or emergency have a clear benefit for patients. Such services may consist of locating the nearest hospital or medical centre, including the description of the route to get there, or in calling the local emergency centre in order to order an ambulance. From the point of view of medical professionals, they could be liberated from certain standard decision and negotiation tasks that are currently carried out by humans but that could be delegated to artificial agents. Such tasks include, for instance, the assignment of ambulances to emergency patients, or finding an appropriate hospital for a patient. Finally, augmenting the possibilities of exchanging data on-demand among different parties, e.g., medical records, will be beneficial for the whole system, because it allows for more personalized and, thus, more effective medical treatments. In this Chapter we present our multi-agent organization-based application for the integrated management of emergency medical assistance (EMA): the processes involved in attending people that suffer sudden illnesses at any possible location
M. Lujak () • H. Billhardt CETINIA, University Rey Juan Carlos, Madrid, Spain e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]
S. Ossowski (ed.), Agreement Technologies, Law, Governance and Technology Series 8, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-5583-3__35, © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013
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within an area of influence – including a possible in-situ assistance and the transfer to a medical centre. The application is based on the operation of the Emergency Medical Coordination Centre SUMMA112; the centre responsible for out-of-hospital medical assistance in the Autonomous Region of Madrid in Spain. The application has two main objectives. On one hand, it aims to provide a seamless interaction between the participating entities assuring that the specified protocols and norms that regulate the assistance processes are fulfilled. Furthermore, the application provides access to remote medical data of an emergency patient, if such data is available, and thus, allows medical professionals to make better decisions about the appropriate treatment of a patient. On the other hand, the application employs coordination mechanisms that aim at an efficient use of the available resources (ambulances) from a global point of view. The main goal here is
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