Using a multiagent organizational approach to improve knowledge provision for shared decision making in patient-physician relationships: an example from Germany

An integral aspect of sound patient centric healthcare delivery is the notion of shared decision making between patient and provider. This paradigm is well documented in the extant literature. However, what appears to be a stumbling block to date is successfully implementing such an approach within established healthcare processes. This void is causing problems in healthcare delivery in particular in EU countries such as Germany because knowledge sources are distributed and underlie strict privacy policies; while the lack of adequate shared decision making compromises the quality of healthcare delivery and can lead to errors and inefficient workflow. This paper which is based on an extensive research project serves to analyze the provision of personal guidance services for shared decision making in eHealth service networks. By doing so, we address the problem of distributed and privacy-aware knowledge sharing by the formation of agent-based organizations to represent the relationships of patients and physicians and study this problem from the perspective of multiagent systems; i.e., we develop technology enabled collaboration solutions. The efficacy of the proffered decision support system will be demonstrated by a scenario-based evaluation. We contend that such an approach will address the current void.