Microsoft has today launched its health Common User Interface (CUI), designed to help improve patient safety and the efficiency of clinicians by providing them with a standard user interface for clinical systems.
Developed in partnership with the English NHS the CUI is now available to all healthcare developers around the world at no cost at http://www.mscui.net/.
Microsoft says that the international launch marks the completion of the first phase of the NHS Common User Interface Project, after two years of work. The CUI work is now being made available to healthcare application developers around the world, and Microsoft says it will now work with a wider community to develop CUI.
The CUI, which initially consists of a guide and set of tools for creating a common look and feel to critical clinical applications, is available as a free toolkit which developers can use to incorporate into their systems.
Adoption of the CUI enables application providers to ensure a consistent user interface and presentation of data such as date and drug dosages, information which today can often be delivered in a confusing variety of ways by different clinical systems. As well as helping improve patient safety CUI can ensure healthcare professionals get a familiar look and feel across a range of different systems, improving efficiency.
Designed to be used by healthcare application providers and institutions the CUI has been developed in partnership with the English National Health Service. The CUI has been the focus of a major development project by Microsoft over the past two years.
The initial release of the CUI has created guidance and tools for a common look and feel for patient-critical functions, intended to increase patient safety and clinician effectiveness and reduce training and support costs, among other benefits.
The Microsoft Health CUI has been developed to ensure NHS doctors can spend more time focusing on providing optimal care to their patients and less time worrying about searching for the right way to enter information into the system.
"For every healthcare institution around the world, patient safety is of paramount importance," said Tim Smokoff, general manager, worldwide health for the Worldwide Public Sector at Microsoft. "The Microsoft health Common User Interface will help developers building healthcare applications ensure a higher level of quality control through a common look and feel to reduce the margin for error and save lives in the process."
"The NHS is a complex organization due to the diversity of care settings, applications and vendors," said Dr. Mark Ferrar, director of infrastructure at NHS Connecting for Health, "Our ultimate goal is to make systems easier to use and more consistent, and increase patient safety in the process. Microsoft’s expert role in helping us manage technologies and achieve cost savings is vital; initial feedback is very positive."
"Microsoft Health CUI ensures a common look, feel and set of rules around standard processes in healthcare, which can help us shorten the development cycle on certain projects, adding value to clinicians and ultimately transferring benefits to the patient," said Sean Riddell, healthcare managing director at EMIS. "Extending the Microsoft Health CUI beyond the U.K. will have a significant impact on patient safety worldwide."
To date, however, adoption within the NHS has been limited, with only some application providers so far implementing elements of CUI into their systems. The largest supplier to so far begin to incorporate elements of CUI into its products is primary care systems vendor EMIS.
Microsoft has previously indicated that in the future it hopes that the safety and efficiency benefits of CUI in health will lead to adoption becoming a core standard that the NHS will accredit suppliers against.
The CUI provides both platform-independent guidance for designing clinical interfaces that can be implemented on any software technology, together with a reference implementation on the Microsoft platform and the .NET Framework. Microsoft says that the CUI is an important element of its ‘Connected Health Platform’ concept.
The guidance and software code are available to download at no cost, and are designed to support the delivery of safe patient care across a healthcare system.
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