Web-based health care agents; the case of reminders and todos, too (R2Do2)

This paper describes efforts to develop and field an agent-based, healthcare middleware framework that securely connects practice rule sets to patient records to anticipate health todo items and to remind and alert users about these items over the web. Reminders and todos, too (R2Do2) is an example of merging data- and document-centric architectures, and of integrating agents into patient-provider collaboration environments. A test of this capability verifies that R2Do2 is progressing toward its two goals: (1) an open standards framework for middleware in the healthcare field; and (2) an implementation of the ‘principle of optimality’ to derive the best possible health plans for each user. This paper concludes with lessons learned to date.