GARDE-Chat: a scalable, open-source platform for building and deploying health chatbots.

Abstract

Chatbots are increasingly used to deliver health education, patient engagement, and access to healthcare services. GARDE-Chat is an open-source platform designed to facilitate the development, deployment, and dissemination of chatbot-based digital health interventions across different domains and settings. GARDE-Chat was developed through an iterative process informed by real-world use cases to guide prioritization of key features. The tool was developed as an open-source platform to promote collaboration, broad dissemination, and impact across research and clinical domains. GARDE-Chat's main features include (1) a visual authoring interface that allows non-programmers to design chatbots; (2) support for scripted, large language model (LLM)-based and hybrid chatbots; (3) capacity to share chatbots with researchers and institutions; (4) integration with external applications and data sources such as electronic health records and REDCap; (5) delivery via web browsers or text messaging; and (6) detailed audit log supporting analyses of chatbot user interactions. Since its first release in July 2022, GARDE-Chat has supported the development of chatbot-based interventions tested in multiple studies, including large pragmatic clinical trials addressing topics such as genetic testing, COVID-19 testing, tobacco cessation, and cancer screening. Ongoing challenges include the effort required for developing chatbot scripts, ensuring safe use of LLMs, and integrating with clinical systems. GARDE-Chat is a generalizable platform for creating, implementing, and disseminating scalable chatbot-based population health interventions. It has been validated in several studies, and it is available to researchers and healthcare systems through an open-source mechanism.