Practice Fusion, the leading provider of health records software for medical professionals, has published a nice recap of their user conference, Connect11, where Alan Cooper spoke about the role of interaction design in health care. Among the questions answered - “what do you get when you cross a computer with a doctor’s office?”

At the 13 minute mark, Stefan Klocek presents a prototype of Practice Fusion’s new iPad app.

Via Cooper Journal

Is Microsoft Common User Interface ended?

MSCUI provides User Interface Design Guidance and Toolkit controls that address a wide range of patient safety issues faced by healthcare organizations worldwide. However, in the last months we haven’t received any new a part from their Clinical Documentation Solution.

Does it mean it’s over? Despite the ambition of providing a definitive CUI, Microsoft has done an impressive work providing guidelines that work at least for its primary target market: the NHS.

Now it is in our hands thinking if the effort is worthless or, in the contrary, it is the moment of continuing validating whether that common user interface could be a real standard somewhere else or not. 

Ended or not, we cannot ignore the big amount of knowledge and information that can be learned and used from MSCUI. This will be always a reference to take into consideration.

MSCUI Clinical Documentation Solution

A great tool as clinical documentation solution where we can see how the UI follows the real artifact with accelerators to help filling the form out.

What I liked from the video sample: 

  1. The form looks like a document (since it is a document indeed)
  2. It is supported by a summary of the form on the right to aid users to understand the final status of the information (completed or uncompleted among others)
  3. It integrates SNOMED (r) for quick coding

What I didn’t see very clear:

  1. The way they have integrated prescriptions management. I think the real case workflow is more complex than the one showed in the video, actually it is the simplified version of their own Search and Prescribe control.

Anyway, it is inspiring, isn’t it?