The SAGE project is a large scale, three-year project (2002-2004), funded in part by an award from the U.S. Department of Commerce National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Advanced Technology Program (ATP). To accomplish our goals, we have formed a multi-faceted partnership between industry, academic centers, and health care delivery organizations to provide a necessary aggregate of expertise in guideline modeling science, clinical excellence, health care quality improvement, and medical informatics.

Our approach is to build on a valuable foundation of existing research in guideline modeling and knowledge representation science. In pursuit of our technical objectives, we will employ (and extend where necessary), the best available informatics standards and controlled terminologies, via close collaboration with standards development efforts, such as HL7, LOINC, SNOMED.

An important differentiator for the SAGE project is its focus on active deployment of guideline content within the workflow of clinical information systems. During the project, IDX Carecast will be our prototyping environment for guideline deployment; however, our goal is a universal infrastructure that will allow activation of guideline content within any standards-conforming clinical information system.