An intelligent agent-based knowledge broker for enterprise-wide healthcare knowledge procurement

Within the confines of a healthcare enterprise memory (HEM), most traditional medical systems do not sufficiently provide the necessary assistance to healthcare practitioners in the handling of critical situations. Furthermore, localized knowledge repositories often lack the required knowledge for problem solving. Therefore, in this paper, we present an agent-based knowledge broker called the Intelligent Healthcare Knowledge Assistant (IHKA) for dynamic knowledge gathering, filtering, adaptation and acquisition from a HEM comprising an amalgamation of (i) databases storing empirical knowledge, (ii) case bases storing experiential knowledge, (iii) scenario bases storing tacit knowledge and (iv) document bases storing explicit knowledge. The featured work leverages intelligent agent techniques for autonomous HEM-wide navigation, approximate content matching, inter- and intra-content correlation, and knowledge adaptation and procurement to meet the user's healthcare knowledge needs.