Smart Middleware and Open Standards in the Service of Medicine: Integrating Agents Applied to the Medication Delivery and Administration Process

The challenge of the opportunity is to ‘establish approaches to integrate the current steps of the medication delivery and administration process into a seamless system that is interconnected and recorded in the electronic health record.’ Intelligent Automation’s innovative approach is to utilize an advanced type of middleware, termed software agent technology, for integrating the software, hardware and knowledge elements pertinent to current steps involved in medical administration and medication delivery. Significantly, this type of middleware offers the key advantage that applications can also be built using the middleware technology; thus, it is easy to develop and integrate alerts / safeguard-type applications into a system. Knowledge element integration includes utilization of ontologies (or thesauri), and attendant supporting parsers, mappers and rule engine elements. The integration of Middleware should never become an issue in a medical setting; physicians, nurses, and other healthcare specialists have their established routines/ workflows for delivering patient care. The middleware should never be an element that causes them to perturb their routine. Rather, it must remain unobtrusive while assisting their established workflow while offering integrated applications that offer safeguards that improve patient safety.