Modeling Medical Ethics through Intelligent Agents

Abstract

The amount of research using health information has increased dramatically over the last past years. Indeed, a significative number of healthcare institutions have extensive Electronic Health Records (EHR), collected over several years for clinical and teaching purposes, but are uncertain as to the proper circumstances in which to use them to improve the delivery of care to the ones in need. Research Ethics Boards in Portugal and elsewhere in the world are grappling with these issues, but lack clear guidance regarding their role in the creation of and access to EHRs. However, we feel we have an effective way to handle Medical Ethics if we look to the problem under a structured and more rational way. Indeed, we felt that physicians were not aware of the relevance of the subject in their pre-clinical years, but their interest increase when they were exposed to patients. On the other hand, once EHRs are stored in machines, we also felt that we had to find a way to ensure that the behavior of machines toward human users, and perhaps other machines as well, is ethically acceptable. Therefore, in this article we discuss the importance of machine ethics and the need for machines that represent ethical principles explicitly. It is also shown how a machine may abstract an ethical principle from a logical representation of ethical judgments and use that principle to guide its own behavior.

Examination and diagnosis of electronic patient records and their associated ethics: a scoping literature review

“…The roles and responsibilities of healthcare professionals, healthcare organisations and healthcare policymakers for responsible use of EPRs and for maintaining best practices are debated in many articles [31,38,43,49,54,57,83,85,94,95,111,139,141,145,157]. Information technology (IT) personnel also have responsibilities for example, for securing the required infrastructure [121] or an ethical development of technology [130,158,159].…”

An Agent-Based Architecture for Cancer Staging

“…In the development of a MAS, in order to be able to communicate in a rich manner, presents a potential normalized infrastructure of openness, autonomy, robustness, scaleability and flexibility (Charlton et al, 2000). The coordination among agents was successfully implemented following this norm, though when integrating with the institutions proprietary agent systems, the HL7 norm was used in order to ensure that both platforms were compliant with the same standard (Machado et al, 2008).…”

“…The proposed architecture is in production at an healthcare unit and stands as a stepping-stone influence process towards a platform which will allow distinct and technology independent decision support systems to be fully adapted to the healthcare environment through the use of EHR technologies. It was under this assumption that an Agency for the Integration, Archive and Diffusion of Medical Information (AIDA) was developed, using new computational paradigms and methodologies for problem solving, which have been based based on the concept of agent (Machado et al, 2008).…”

A Step towards Medical Ethics Modeling

“…Current research indicates that non-monotic logic, due to its ability to implement defeasible inference, enabling moral principles to add and still diminish the set of conclusions determined by the knowledge base, is an interesting and promising technique to model moral reasoning [3] [4] [5]. By this mean, principles of benevolence and nonmalificience can exist in accordance with other principles that are against their value or state an exception for superseding context principles.…”