A multi-agent system approach for monitoring the prescription of restricted use antibiotics

Abstract

Hospitals have a specified set of antibiotics for restricted use (ARU), very expensive, which are only recommended for special pathologies. The pharmacy department daily checks the prescription of this kind of antibiotics since it is often the case that, after a careful analysis, one can get the same therapeutic effects by using normal antibiotics which are much cheaper and usually less aggressive. In this paper, we describe a multi-agent system to help in the revision of medical prescriptions containing antibiotics of restricted use. The proposed approach attaches an agent to each patient which is responsible of checking different medical aspects related to his/her prescribed therapy. A pharmacy agent is responsible for analyzing it and suggesting alternative antibiotic treatments. All these agents are integrated in a hospital distributed scenario composed by many different kinds of software and human agents. This patient-centered multi-agent scenario is specified using the design methodology of Electronic Institutions.