Dispatching hospitals intelligently:: A service-oriented approach

Emergencies happen frequently and handling them effectively is necessary. In many cases, emergencies are treated by a static procedure, without considering the requirements of the current situation. Especially, in the case of health emergencies, static plans, such as taking the patient to a predetermined hospital may not be the best option. Hence, an intelligent user assistance is necessary to understand the user's complaints, to partially diagnose her illness, and to direct the user to an appropriate hospital. This paper develops an agent-based service-oriented architecture for dispatching hospitals. The hospital dispatcher helps patients state the symptoms of their complaints through a mobile device such as a mobile phone. Next, the hospital dispatcher translates these symptoms to possible diseases and then finds hospitals that can cure these diseases. Further, by automatically interacting with the hospitals' services, the hospital dispatcher can gather useful information such as the occupancy of the hospital, the cost of the treatment, and so on. The hospital dispatcher performs reasoning on the user data using ontologies. The service-oriented architecture of the system removes interactions with the humans out of the loop.