Improving knowledge provision for shared decision making in patient-physician relationships – a multiagent organizational approach.

Abstract

The paradigm of shared decision making in patient-physician relationships is well documented. Moreover, it is an integral aspect of sound patient centric healthcare delivery. Implementing such an approach within established healthcare processes has yet to be successfully realized. This void is causing problems in healthcare delivery in particular in EU countries such as Germany because knowledge sources are distributed and underlie strict privacy policies, while the lack of adequate shared decision making compromises the quality of healthcare delivery and can lead to errors and inefficient workflow. This paper serves to analyze the provision of personal guidance services for shared decision making in eHealth service networks. By doing so, we address the problem of distributed and privacy-aware knowledge sharing by the formation of agent-based organizations to represent the relationships of patients and physicians and study this problem from the perspective of multiagent systems, i.e. we develop technology enabled collaboration solutions. The efficacy of the proffered decision support system will be demonstrated by a scenario-based evaluation. We contend that such an approach will address the current void.