Agent-Based Interoperability System In Health Insurance

Abstract

The Information Technology industry has been very dynamic in health insurance for the last couple of decades. In this health insurance firms applications have been developed using different methodologies, and technologies. These applications cannot be integrated, which becomes an issue to health insurance interoperability. Health insurance is available to both individual and groups; there are many insurance companies in Kenya and there is no central database to extract stratified information about them. Attempts by many scholars to develop an interoperable system have not been successful largely due to lack of expertise, resources and the inherent complex nature of the health insurance system. There is also difficulty in accessing the required data by different people due to the fact that the applications of these insurance firms are independent. They are designed in any manner, and can use different technologies. This study proposed an agent-based platform which allowed users to receive and exchange data and information from distributed sources. The health insurance business was used as a case study to implement multi-agents approach in this study. In this case study, different agents were used to represent different functional areas in the developed system. The reactivity, proactive, sociability characteristics of multi-agents achieved health insurance interoperability and accomplished the health insurance business requirements. In this study we reviewed pure theory, evaluated and developed an agent based system which allowed health insurance firms to share data and also data sharing platform that enabled collaboration among multiple health insurance institutions in Kenya and also the experimental results showed that the platform could be extended easily to support a large number of concurrent client connections.