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IADIS International Conference WWW/Internet 2010which is an reactive agent with a set of rules .. The agent is notified whenever a newmeasurement is added to VHCR. It extracts it and compares it to admissible limits. When the agent is firstinstalled this limits are the default ones, based on the age, sex and health issues of the patient. However thehealthcare professional can customize the admissible limits to others tailored to the patient treatment. Theactions can be customized by the patient and consist in notification either of the patient or the generalpractitioner. An important issue here is the use of the monitoring agents in preventing the spread ofepidemics. For example they can receive updates from national authorities when a new strain of flu appears,the symptoms being added to the agent knowledge base. Suppose the symptoms consist of fever, coughingand headaches. When the patient measures his/her temperature the data is received by the agent whichprompts the patient to answer a query regarding his condition. If the patient confirms the symptoms, he isinformed he may be suffering from the flu and is invited to make an appointment to a health care provider.The agents themselves rely on low-level services to accomplish their tasks. These services are providedby the supporting agents as described below:• Broker agentIt acts as a registry for the agents supporting their discovery and communication. When a new agent isplugged in, it registers to the broker agent, publishing its services.• Agent lifecycle managerIt is responsible for creating new instances of agents, for activating and passivating agents when needed.It also acts as a garbage collector, removing unnecessary instances.• Agent`s ontology translation agentIn case our local agents communicate with agents and applications using a different medical terminologywe need a set of mappings between different vocabularies to achieve semantic interoperability. This is doneby creating and maintaining a registry of mappings, which falls under the responsibility of the agent`sontology translation agent. Whenever an agent encounters an unknown term it queries the translation agentfor a synonym. The translation agent either has the mapping in its knowledge base; either makes a query toan UMLS terminology server. The Unified Medical Language System (UMLS, 2010) is a compendium ofmany controlled vocabularies in the biomedical sciences. It provides a mapping structure among thesevocabularies and thus allows one to translate among the various terminology systems; it may also be viewedas a comprehensive thesaurus and ontology of biomedical concepts.4. VHCR IMPLEMENTATIONCurrently VHCR is a proof-of-concept prototype, and work has been carried out on extracting use cases fromcurrent medical practice, national regulations, published clinical pathways and also HL7 functionalrequirements for EHRs. Another point of interest was designing a message ontology to support agentcommunication.We have chosen JADE (JADE, 2010) as a platform for our software agents since it complies with FIPAspecifications (FIPA, 2005). JADE offers a seamless integration of rules written in JESS (JESS, 2008), a Javaimplementation of the RETE algorithm. Currently we are evaluating the possibility of implementing ourworkflow agents in WADE, a JADE extension that allows agents to execute tasks defined according to theworkflow metaphor.5. CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORKOur VHCR project is in design phase. We are analyzing the infrastructure supporting VHCR, a middlewareproviding authentification, authorization and encryption services. An open topic is complying with ebXMLstandards, acquiring a better interoperability and also integrating health services in broader businessprocesses.275