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Chapter 8
Sharing Medical Information
by Means of Using Intelligent
Agents and Cloud Computing
ABSTRACT
From birth to death, every human being leaves a long medical history consisting of laboratory exams,
records of medical consultations, records, and hospitalizations, as well as any other important infor-
mation that afects the patient’s health. These are known today as Electronic Health Records (EHR) or
Electronic Medical Records (EMR). However, because a person’s lifestyle and health are continuously
changing, most of this medical information is distributed among diferent institutions, cities, and even
countries where the specifc processes were undertaken, in possession of health insurance providers
or even hidden inside a drawer of the patient’s home. Therefore, aiming to enhance the availability of
improved medical services at reduced costs, modern information technology is being increasingly used
in the healthcare sector. Researchers, developers, and companies have made eforts to develop mobile,
Web, desktop, and enterprise e-health applications raising the importance of interoperability and data
exchange between e-health applications and Health Information Systems (HIS). In this regard, Cloud
Computing (CC) promises low cost, high scalability, availability, and disaster recoverability, which
can be a natural solution for some of the problems faced in storing and analyzing EMRs. However, CC,
which is mainly defned to address the use of scalable and often virtualized resources, is still evolving.
New, specifc collaboration models among service providers are needed for enabling efective service
collaboration, allowing the process of serving consumers to be more efcient. In this chapter, the cur-
rent state and trends of CC in healthcare are presented as well as a detailed collaboration model based
on intelligent agents focusing on the EHR sharing subject. This model for enabling efective service in
cloud systems is based on a recent research proposal related to defning a collaboration mechanism by
means of Scout Movement. The chapter also includes details on the way in which services and service
providers are clearly defned in this particular system.
Mauricio Paletta
Universidad Nacional Experimental de Guayana (UNEG), Venezuela
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-6118-9.ch008