Information Sciences: an International Journal
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In this paper, we present a multiagent system to support patients in search of healthcare services in an e-health scenario. The proposed system is HL7-aware in that it represents both patient and service information according to the directives of HL7, the information management standard adopted in medical context. Our system builds a profile for each patient and uses it to detect Healthcare Service Providers delivering e-health services potentially capable of satisfying his needs. In order to handle this search it can exploit three different algorithms: the first, called PPB, uses only information stored in the patient profile; the second, called DS-PPB, considers both information stored in the patient profile and similarities among the e-health services delivered by the involved providers; the third, called AB, relies on {\rm A}{\bf^*}, a popular search algorithm in Artificial Intelligence. Our system builds also a social network of patients; once a patient submits a query and retrieves a set of services relevant to him, our system applies a spreading activation technique on this social network to find other patients who may benefit from these services.