Healthcare developers can take the next step toward increasing patient safety and clinician effectiveness with the new version 1.3 of Microsoft Health Common User Interface (CUI), available today from Microsoft Corp. A portfolio of user interface guidance, software toolkit controls and showcase demonstrators, the Microsoft Health CUI supports software developers in delivering safe and effective clinical applications. Based on a set of patient safety principles, the guidance and controls from CUI are available at no cost and are focused on medication management, patient record noting, hand-over of care, consistent navigation and patient identification — all areas of potential patient safety risk. Version 1.3 also provides an 18-month road map of product releases and substantial guidance updates, and utilizes Microsoft Silverlight technology to showcase the latest demonstrators.

Developed in collaboration with and in use today at the National Health Service (NHS) in England, as well as a growing worldwide community of healthcare providers and developers, the CUI became available to all healthcare developers worldwide in July 2007. The CUI allows software vendors and application developers flexibility to develop solutions to meet their own specialized development challenges and spend more time focusing on facilitating patient care through new and innovative software applications. Most notably, version 1.3 moves the CUI to a new technology platform with fresh controls, samples and demonstrations now being developed especially for Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Silverlight. The use of these platforms within the CUI enables software vendors and application developers to provide richer and more flexible user interfaces for specific healthcare implementations. In addition, an 18-month interactive road map for the design guidance and controls is available today, intended for software and application developers who want to better understand updated timelines and ways they can participate in the Microsoft Health CUI community.