Using software agents to maintain autonomous patient registries for clinical research.

A software agent is an application that can function in an autonomous and intelligent fashion. We have used mobile software agents to maintain clinicians' patient research databases (patient registries). Agents were used to acquire data from the clinician and place it into the registries, copy data from hospital databases into the registries, and report data from the registries. The agents were programmed with the intelligence to navigate through complex network security, interact with legacy systems, and protect themselves from various forms of failure at multiple levels. To maximize the separation between our system and the hospital information infrastructure we often used Java, a platform-independent language, to program and distribute our software agents. By using mobile agents, we were able to distribute the computing time required by these applications to underutilized host machines upon which the registries could be maintained.