A Swarm Based Algorithm for a Healthcare Information System

This paper introduces H-finder, a bio-inspired algorithm to build a decentralized and self-organized P2P information system in healthcare environment. The algorithm takes advantage of the properties of ant systems, in which a number of entities perform simple operations at the local level and an advanced form of "intelligence" emerges at global level. The work of ant-inspired agents is exploited to organize "metadata", that is, documents containing healthcare information, like Electronic Health Records (EHR), in a network of clinical servers. Agents travel the P2P interconnections among servers and spatially sort metadata in order to organize similar metadata into neighbor hosts. Preliminary performance analysis proves that the proposed algorithm allows the healthcare information to be useful reorganized thus improving the data management.