Steps towards a digital health ecosystem

In the paper an IT infrastructure for supporting the shift from organization-centric to patient-centric model of healthcare service delivery to facilitate collaborative, multidisciplinary and cross-organizational healthcare delivery processes is presented. The core of this infrastructure is an internet platform that provides e-services and promotes the interoperability by enabling not only inter-communication among authorized healthcare professionals, but also sharing the Virtual Healthcare Record, an authoritative, multi-dimensional view on the patient health state. The platform is implemented in the LuMiR project for Basilicata, an Italian region where integration of healthcare applications is required. The LUMIR approach, its origin and peculiarities are briefly presented. The project's final target is the regional health digital ecosystem that interacts with the healthcare system for better supporting it. The agent-oriented paradigm emerges as a promising approach to map the autonomic healthcare systems and their users in virtual entities, and to add values such as flexibility, adaptability, and reusability. over traditional object- or service-oriented approaches.