Intelligent agent based hospital search & appointment system
Tyrone Edwards, Suresh Sankaranarayanan · 2009
Access to the correct healthcare facility is a major concern for most people in today's world. Any average person will need to carry out a search of the hospitals and healthcare facilities within his/her locality to gather information such as skill level of doctors, type of facilities available in the hospital, the environment (cleanliness), the level of customer service provided and the affordability of the services offered. After gathering this information the average person would then do a comparison and then make a selection and then fix an appointment with a doctor in that hospital. Since, time to be spent for this purpose is a major constraint for any individual these days. Research is currently underway in this area, towards incorporating Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and also to improve the services provided in the Health Industry. Taking this aspect into consideration, we here propose an agent based approach to replicate the same search operations as the individual would do, by an intelligent agent, which also enables fixing an appointment with an appropriate doctor, once the selection process is completed. The proposed agent based system has been validated by implementing it on an individual's smart phone or a PDA using JADE-LEAP agent development kit. The details are provided in the paper