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 are often lacking 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-repositories content correlation, and knowledge adaptation and procurement to meet the user's healthcare knowledge needs.