Interoperability in health information systems is increasingly a requirement rather than an option. Standards and technologies, such as multi-agent systems, have proven to be powerful tools in interoperability issues. In the last few years, the authors have worked on developing the Agency for Integration, Diffusion and Archive of Medical Information (AIDA), which is an intelligent, agent-based platform to ensure interoperability in healthcare units. It is increasingly important to ensure the high availability and reliability of systems. The functions provided by the systems that treat interoperability cannot fail. This paper shows the importance of monitoring and controlling intelligent agents as a tool to anticipate problems in health information systems. The interaction between humans and agents through an interface that allows the user to create new agents easily and to monitor their activities in real time is also an important feature, as health systems evolve by adopting more features and solving new problems. A module was installed in Centro Hospitalar do Porto, increasing the functionality and the overall usability of AIDA.

With technological advances, the amount of data and the information systems in healthcare units has been increasing exponentially. The accessibility and availability of patients’ clinical information are a constant need. The Agency for Integration, Diffusion and Archive of Medical Information (AIDA) was developed to fulfill this need and it was implemented at the Centro Hospitalar do Porto (CHP), revealing a highly successful, ensuring interoperability among CHP healthcare information systems. This paper presents a new AIDA module, which aims to monitor the activity of its agents. It revealed its usefulness, providing to the user the functionalities and the necessary data for it to make a complete monitoring of the activities of each AIDA agent. It was still considered an efficient system, since it does not compromise the resources of the machine where it was implemented. In addition, this module increases AIDA functionality and efficiency

With the advancement of technology, patient information has been being computerized in order to facilitate the work of healthcare professionals and improve the quality of healthcare delivery. However, there are many heterogeneous information systems that need to communicate, sharing information and making it available when and where it is needed. To respond to this requirement the Agency for Integration, Diffusion, and Archiving of medical information (AIDA) was created, a multi-agent and service-based platform that ensures interoperability among healthcare information systems. In order to improve the performance of the platform, beyond the SWOT analysis performed, a system to prevent failures that may occur in the platform database and also in machines where the agents are executed was created. The system has been implemented in the Centro Hospitalar do Porto (one of the major Portuguese hospitals), and it is now possible to define critical workload periods of AIDA, improving high availability and load balancing. This is explored in this chapter.