Agent-based interoperability system in health insurance

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 paper proposes an agent-based platform, which allows users to receive and exchange data and information from distributed sources. However, the multitude, diversity and the dynamic nature of multimedia data on the Internet make it difficult for us to access any specific piece of data in health insurance. Nonetheless, we use software agents to (1) identify and collect files from heterogeneous information sources over the internet (2) accept queries from clients, (3) process and present the query results to the client and (4) index and maintain a centralized database for storing data. With the agent paradigm in our system, our approaches are able (1) to increase system's robustness, (2) to increase system modularity and therefore make system maintenance easier, (3) to take advantage of distributed computing resources, (4) to make delegation of tasks easier in a centralized control, and (5) to make distributed control more feasible. In this study since Health insurance business is one of the dynamic businesses, and requires frequent changes in business needs. The systems have to be very flexible for changes, and at the same time any issues with the existing systems has to be spotted out quickly. The agent based interoperability system approach allows the flexibility of changes through subsystem of processes, flexibility of application architecture, and quality of data. In this study we shall review pure theory, evaluate and develop an agent-based framework that will allow health insurance firms to share data and also data sharing platform that enables collaboration among multiple health insurance institutions in Kenya. In this paper, we describe the system architecture and the interoperability for streaming data. Experimental results show that the platform can be extended easily to support a large number of concurrent client connections.