This article is part of a special issue on Intelligent Agents in Healthcare. This article proposes a secure medical-information-gathering system based on mobile agents that overcomes traditional systems' data availability issues. Information availability is a major concern when the provision of care is at stake. Physicians make their decisions based on available information. Virtual electronic patient records (VEPRs) provide the necessary means for intra-institution data integration, enabling a single view of all patients' clinical information. Nevertheless, patients are mobile entities visiting multiple institutions during their life, leaving a trail of scattered information. This proposal is based on a mobile-agent system that provides IEEE-FIPA standardized interinstitution data discovery, transport, and integration for medical information. It combines traditional security schemes for protecting information with advanced agent-driven self-protection mechanisms and role-based access control. The system interacts with remote legacy applications, thus facilitating integration of clinical documents. Highly sensitive medical information can be brought where needed.