Knowledge-Based Support of Medical Work in Home Care

Abstract

Healthcare applications involve complex structures of interacting processes and professionals that need to exchange information to provide the care services. In this kind of system, many different professional competencies, ethical and sensibility requirements, as well as legal frameworks coexist, and because of that, the information managed inside the system should not be freely accessed. On the contrary, it must be subject to very complex privacy restrictions. In the chapter, the authors describe a case study of a knowledge-based distributed system, the fundamental issues that must be considered in design of a distributed healthcare application. The K4CARE system is an example of an application to the medical domain of homecare assistance. Homecare involves professionals from different institutions (hospital, social workers, etc.) that must interact around any particular patient, and which used to be located in different physical places having their own and independent information systems.