SAGEDesktop: an environment for testing clinical practice guidelines

Clinical practice guidelines have begun to appear in electronic form with the expectation that they will be used to provide automated clinical decision support. Systems capable of executing these clinical practice guidelines are emerging concurrently. A few research projects have developed guideline authoring tools that allow encoding electronic clinical practice guidelines. However, we are not aware of tools that allow testing of electronic clinical practice guidelines by their authors. We have developed a tool called SAGEDesktop for the testing of electronic clinical practice guidelines. SAGEDesktop does not require external infrastructure to carry out this testing. It includes: 1) an embedded guideline engine which can execute electronic clinical practice guidelines 2) functionality that emulates the capabilities of a clinical information system necessary for the execution of the guideline, and 3) terminology server functionality that encapsulates standard clinical terms. Coupled with an authoring tool, SAGEDesktop provides a complete development environment in which precise and robust electronic clinical practice guidelines can be encoded and tested. We describe the features of SAGEDesktop, narrate our vision of the tool's use, and discuss SAGEDesktop's strengths and weaknesses.