What is GARDE?

GARDE is an open-source digital health software platform and chatbot creation tool, funded by several grants from the National Cancer Institute. GARDE enables population-level risk assessment for health conditions that can be combined with chatbot-based outreach and education.

GARDE has two components:

  1. population-level risk assessment algorithms that analyze patient data in the electronic health record (EHR) to identify patients who meet criteria for health services (Figure 1); and
GARDE workflow

Figure 1. GARDE workflow.

  1. a chatbot authoring platform (GARDE-Chat) that allows researchers and their teams to create healthcare chatbots for patient outreach, education, and access to appropriate health services (Figure 2).
GARDE architecture

Figure 2. Chatbot example.

GARDE algorithms and GARDE-Chat chatbots are EHR and healthcare system-agnostic. They can be used in various clinical settings. GARDE algorithms have been deployed across 6 academic medical centers. Over 20 studies use GARDE-Chat across various clinical domains and settings, from pilot trials to large pragmatic clinical trials. GARDE algorithms and GARDE-Chat chatbots can be shared and adapted across research projects and institutions. GARDE algorithms and GARDE-Chat chatbots can be used independently or in combination depending on the study design and implementation approach.

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