Scenario-based analysis of an agent-based architecture for health care decision support systems

Recent years have seen an increased amount of interest in decision-support applications in the health care field. However, the development of such applications has been hindered by many barriers including lack of timely access to data and applications. In this paper, we present three alternative agent-based architectures for DSS applications that will facilitate, the delivery and maintenance of treatment guidelines, the establishment and maintenance of inter-organizational repositories and, the execution of prospective and retrospective outcomes studies. A scenario-based analysis methodology is used to evaluate these alternative architectures.