Microsoft launches CUI internationally

11 Sep 2007

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.

Link

http://www.mscui.net/

Microsoft NHS Resource Centre

Reader's Comments

CUI - Compulsory for all CfH suppliers?

11 Sep 07 14:29

Will the CUI be a compulsory "standard" for all CfH approved suppliers including additional software suppliers (Pathology systems, Pharmacy systems, Radiology systems etc) or will the screen designs/layout just be a "guideline" recommendation.

Compulsory CUI?

11 Sep 07 15:34

So has it been approved - after due consultation - by the NHS Information Standards Board?

Compulsory CUI?

nigel.simmons@nhs.net

11 Sep 07 20:25

Four DSCNs relating to the CUI were issued in late July.

www.connectingforhealth.nhs.uk/dscn/dscn2007

Although the Standards Board will not give final approval until July 2008, the DSCNs are set to become mandatory from 1st August 2009.

CUI - contractual horse bolted?

12 Sep 07 11:45

CUI is a praiseworthy effort and they have avoided it becoming purely a collection of widgets for MS .Net developers.

However the CUI project kicked off a year after the initial NPfIT contracts were signed and comes to (some sort of) fruition after the recent recasting of many of these contracts.

Given suppliers

1. partly differentiate the products based on interface innovation

2. some of the CUI's 'deeper' recommendations require radical system redesign (not always restricted to the front end level)

one cannot envisage supplier or LSP enthusiasm for this initiative without a contractual incentive.

CUI also begs the question - if the NHS needed a common user interface, why didn't they commission a single system? Doh! Another case of joined up NPfIT thinking (or should that be DoH)!

At Last!!!

david.birch@ascend.demon.co.uk

12 Sep 07 12:07

I've been designing (and implementing) healthcare systems for years and it's not before time that a standard is documented and adhered to. It pleases me to discover, with this new publication, that the systems I've designed have implemented the majority of these basically common sense standards. But most applications out there do not at present. There will be a major re-engineering of systems required if the standard becomes compulsory and this scares me somewhat. My only other gripe is why has this taken so long to pull together?!?

Decent but sadly lacking

13 Sep 07 11:14

I spent a couple of hours going through these documents and, to be honest, it is a decent start but sadly lacking in innovative content.

My area of interest is in medication management and the documentation in lacking any real reference to the complex areas of continuous IV, bolus dose administration, and sliding scale representations.

I cannot find any reference to the order entry of medications and the multiple complex processes required to be supported.

Admission/discharge medication reconciliation are other areas of complexity and repeatedly proven to be highly prone to errors.

It is in these complex process areas that the CUI could truly deliver great intellectual and risk benefit. Unfortunately this is sadly lacking and, as a previous commentator has pointed out, much of what is in this stuff is common sense.

Millions of pounds not so well spent - my simple opinion.

re: Millions of pounds not well spent

13 Sep 07 14:07

Let me be the first to chime in that the CUI project is Microsoft funded with the possible exception of a tiny handful of secondments (which would be insignificant within the bandwidth drain on the NHS from wider CfH).

However Microsoft would regard their expenditure on CUI as an highly effective loss leader by retaining NPfIT mindshare threatened (as it was) by several major suppliers not being MS dependent shops and allusions to open source options being considered for NHS desktops.

Excuse, but whats the point?

14 Sep 07 08:54

Microsoft has no actual contracts delivering NPfIT projects, they all use their non-standard interfaces, with Cerner even using Win95 intefaces -so what exactly is the point? Beats me.

Nice idea - too late

Not that useful

14 Sep 07 09:29

I agree with "Decent but sadly lacking". There is some good in here, but that really hard stuff isn't covered. Standards on display of dates, patient names etc is all good stuff, but then did that really need to cost 40 *millon* pounds? As for it being "mandatory", well that would be a very bad thing in my view, as there are and will be problems that come to light when you actually try to implement this stuff in the real world - it is quite apparent that the designers haven't had to deal with all of the complex scenarios that the NHS demands.

Lets not also forget that this is also a vehicle to push MS's latest generation of user interface framework...you don't think they're doing it just to help patients do you?

I rather thing the NHS has been had. They've basically paid MS to give them health consultancy, MS is now off to use this to drive their expansion into the health market. I notice that the Microsoft CUI site is now quite distinct from the NHS one - and it's now "Microsoft CUI" and "NHS CUI". How long before the mentions of the NHS slip from the MS website?

Ah I see

14 Sep 07 10:02

Reading the microsoft stuff a bit further, there is actually far less there than in the NHS CUI. So all they've actually done is relaunch a subset of what they already had. Strange.

Forward Thinking

14 Sep 07 11:44

Why is everyone so cynical about CUI? Perhaps if one steps back and thinks about the improvements offered in the arena of patient safety, improved and consistent user interfaces for users, and healthcare efficiency/standards it is obviously a fantastic initiative. Besides, the standards developed do not tie software developers into any Microsoft tools. Perhaps if some of the larger ISVs looked at long term benefits rather than short term gains they may appreciate the importance of this work and improve their long term commercial viability.

Cynical, moi?

andrew.elliott@ascribe.com

14 Sep 07 13:41

My cynicism partly stems from the fact that MS are not reknown for doing things that they don't stand to gain from, and these proposals *are* all based on their new UI framework. No mention of touchscreens, tablets or PDAs for example - do they really think that a complicated, mouse and keyboard driven UI is useful to nurses doing a drug round? If the program was *really* focused on improving care and usability of systems, they might have considered interface design for devices other than desktop PCs...

Mainly though, it's because the devil is in the detail. It's easy to come up with screen designs when you don't have to actually make them work, or to deal with those pesky customers.

I think that the idea of interface standards are a good one, and there is good information and ideas in there, no doubt. But the idea that this is some great new thing that we can now enforce across the industry and make everything great is just not realistic.