title: Building better guidelines with BRIDGE-Wiz: development and evaluation of a software assistant to promote clarity, transparency, and implementability.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  To demonstrate the feasibility of capturing the knowledge required to create guideline recommendations in a systematic, structured, manner using a software assistant. Practice guidelines constitute an important modality that can reduce the delivery of inappropriate care and support the introduction of new knowledge into clinical practice. However, many guideline recommendations are vague and underspecified, lack any linkage to supporting evidence or documentation of how they were developed, and prove to be difficult to transform into systems that influence the behavior of care providers.
  
  
  METHODS
  The BRIDGE-Wiz application (Building Recommendations In a Developer's Guideline Editor) uses a wizard approach to address the questions: (1) under what circumstances? (2) who? (3) ought (with what level of obligation?) (4) to do what? (5) to whom? (6) how and why? Controlled natural language was applied to create and populate a template for recommendation statements.
  
  
  RESULTS
  The application was used by five national panels to develop guidelines. In general, panelists agreed that the software helped to formalize a process for authoring guideline recommendations and deemed the application usable and useful.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Use of BRIDGE-Wiz promotes clarity of recommendations by limiting verb choices, building active voice recommendations, incorporating decidability and executability checks, and limiting Boolean connectors. It enhances transparency by incorporating systematic appraisal of evidence quality, benefits, and harms. BRIDGE-Wiz promotes implementability by providing a pseudocode rule, suggesting deontic modals, and limiting the use of 'consider'.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Users found that BRIDGE-Wiz facilitates the development of clear, transparent, and implementable guideline recommendations.
authors.affiliation: Yale Center for Medical Informatics, New Haven, Connecticut, USA. richard.shiffman@yale.edu
authors.forename: Richard N
authors.initials: RN
authors.lastname: Shiffman
authors.forename: George
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Michel
authors.forename: Richard M
authors.initials: RM
authors.lastname: Rosenfeld
authors.forename: Caryn
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Davidson
mesh_terms: D005240:Feasibility Studies; D009323:Natural Language Processing; D017410:Practice Guidelines as Topic; D012984:Software