| Abstract: | This article is part of a special issue on Intelligent Agents in Healthcare. Healthcare information systems can use agent-oriented cooperation techniques and standardized, electronic healthcare-record-exchange protocols to combine information about the different facets of a patient's therapy provided by different healthcare providers at different locations. Provenance is an innovative approach to tracing events in complex distributed processes. It also traces dependencies between such events and associated decisions by human actors. This article focuses on three aspects of provenance in agent-mediated healthcare systems. First, it defines provenance and shows how to apply it in agent-mediated healthcare applications. Second, it introduces a method that lets independent, autonomous healthcare agents that don't directly interact document their processes. Third, it shows how this approach helps institutions contend with privacy issues. |
