Software Engineering-Inspired
Approach to Prevention Healthcare
Victor Rentea, Andrei Vasilateanu, Radu Ioanitescu and
Luca Dan Serbanati
Faculty of Engineering Taught in Foreign Languages,
Politehnica University of Bucharest,
Bucharest, Romania
victorrentea@gmail.com, andrei.vasilateanu@upb.ro,
ioanitescuradu@yahoo.com, luca@serbanati.com
State of the art
Increased health expenditures:
• increasing chronic conditions, in young people
• global population ageing
Proposed solutions
o Care coordination
o Patient empowerment
Patient empowerment in prevention:
avoid even the start of a chronic condition
Traditional approaches
Existing eHealth IT systems:
• focus on acute disease care
• favor diagnosis and treatment of current symptoms
Future eHealth systems:
-Leverage of EBM data: randomized clinical trials resulting
in clues on the best attitude to follow, quantified in Relative
Risks (RR%)
-Supporting patient empowerment
-Focus on prevention and monitoring
Software Engineering vs
Prevention Healthcare
• Many conceptual similarities:
• Critical decisions based on an abstract model built
within multiple iterations
• Partial knowledge problems in an ever unpredictable
ever-changing universe: business requirements and
health state changes
• Emphasize their continuous nature
• Use of proven patterns and guidelines
• Concern oriented approach to software analysis and
design projected to health state management
Conceptual System Design
• Concern-oriented design
• Main components
• Personal Health Record (PHR)
• Past and present tenses of the patient’s health state
• Latest information, authoritative or not (self-gathered)
• Draws data from the EHR
• Avatar
• Leading agent, coordinator
• Interacts with the user, adapts to his personality
• Tries to increase its impact on the user’s behavior
• Virtual Health Assistant (VHA)
• Distributed maintenance and responsibility of KBses
Patient-Centric Virtual Organization
Conclusion
• Software Engineering aproach to prevention healthcare
• Conceptual design of a concern-oriented multi-agent
system for monitoring the health state and stimulating
the patient empowerment
• Unlike most existing agent systems, the control loop
does not include any medical staff
• quicker adoption, lower costs and greater scalability
• Emphasis on prevention targeted at persons with no or
limited symptomatology.
• Detect incipient stages of an unsuspected illness
• Provide alternatives to prevent its debut