Towards a distributed mobile agent decision support system for optimal patient drug prescription

Prescribing the right combination of drugs for a patient is a difficult task that takes into consideration many factors. It has been reported by the Institute of Medicine from two major studies conducted in the United States, that prescribing the wrong medication is a big problem, and the effects can sometimes be fatal. To address this problem, we propose a distributed intelligent mobile agent-based system architecture that will involve doctors using mobile agents on their smart phones to assist them in making more informed decisions in prescribing optimal personalized drug therapy for patients in hospitals. In this paper, we describe the system architecture that supports the functioning of the intelligent agents. We will also be discussing the behaviour and coordinating roles of these agents as they function in this distributed environment. We then present an initial simulation of the environment with the Java Agent DEvelopment Framework (JADE) as a first step in realizing the proposed solution.