Intelligent agent-based systems constitute one of the most exciting research areas in Artificial Intelligence. Due to the growing interest in the application of agent-based systems in health care, a number of applications addressing clinical problems are already based in agent technology. Thus, it may now be a good time for the specialists in the field to meet and report on the results achieved in this area, to discuss the benefits (and drawbacks) that agent-based systems may bring to medical domains, and also to provide a list of the research topics that should be tackled in the near future.

This workshop will try to incorporate two novel aspects with respect to related workshops held in the last years:

• Interdisciplinary research: special efforts will be devoted to try to attract the attention of health care and biomedical specialists, so that they attend the workshop and realise the potential benefits of agent technology.

• Applied research: the organising committee will also pay special attention to papers describing applications which are not just academic, but that are already deployed and running in a real medical environment.

Current topics of research include personalized health systems for remote and autonomous tele-assistance, communication and co-operation between distributed intelligent agents to manage patient care, information agents that retrieve medical information from distributed repositories, intelligent and distributed data mining, and multi-agent systems that assist the doctors in the tasks of monitoring and diagnosis. Several methodological and technical problems have been discovered by the researchers that attempt to deploy agent-based systems in the medical area; just to name a few, the growing number of huge databases that need to be integrated (e.g. genetic data from next generation sequencing), the difficulty to integrate new agent-based systems with legacy software, the need to apply changing national and international laws and regulations concerning the privacy of medical data and the security of the transaction of patient information between agents.