Thursday, September 3, 2009

MS-HUG Exchange 2009: Clinical Informatics Track Session 7

Building Clinical Solutions Using Microsoft Office, Microsoft SharePoint and the Connected Health Platform
Andrew Kirby, Director, Healthcare Solutions, Microsoft

In this session, Andrew Kirby was able to really demonstrate in an easy-to-consume, visual way exactly how heavily Microsoft is investing in the healthcare market.

Andrew spent a fair amount of time defining and describing Microsoft’s work on the Microsoft Health Common User Interface (CUI). Per the MSCUI website:

The Microsoft Health Common User Interface (CUI) provides User Interface Design Guidance and Toolkit controls that address a wide range of patient safety concerns for healthcare organizations worldwide, enabling a new generation of safer, more usable and compelling health applications to be quickly and easily created.

This initiative is a few years old, and I’m very impressed with the progress that they’ve made. The last time I visited the website, the collection of controls was limited to some very basic components like date pickers. They’ve made huge progress in the past year or two, adding very robust, feature-rich controls like a Medications List View and Patient Banner.

It’s easy to “geek out” over the control toolkit, but I think most of the real value comes from the Design Guidance. It is always a few steps ahead of the control toolkit (because the design gets fleshed out and validated before controls are built), but, more importantly, it provides a deeper view into the rationale behind the design of the controls.

The Patient Journey Demonstrator is used to showcase the controls and design guidance principles and could really be used to design a full-featured EMR, at least the UI.

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