Following a very productive six months of development, we would like to tell you about the additions and enhancements we've made to Microsoft Health CUI in the February 2010 release.

New Design Guidance and Design Exploration Documents

We've released the following new guidance document:

• Patient Identification: Design Guidance – Patient List View provides guidance and recommendations for the safe display of information for multiple patients in a list format. The guidance relates primarily to hospital and acute care scenarios and considers consistent access, display and management of patient information.

We've also published the following three design groundwork exploration documents for community preview:

• Clinical Noting and Terminology: Design Groundwork Exploration – Display of Clinical Statements addresses the problem that SNOMED CT® encoded clinical statements do not have a standardized display format. This lack of consistency creates the potential for users to misinterpret such displays. To inform future design decisions, the design exploration initiates an assessment of the patient safety risks associated with alternative approaches to SNOMED CT display.
• Clinical Noting and Terminology: Design Groundwork Exploration – Noting Using Templates examines how to access and populate electronic data entry structures ('templates') in a clinical environment. The design exploration focuses on the entry of data into an acute medical admissions form implied by the relevant headings from the UK Royal College of Physicians (RCP) work on Standards for Record Keeping.
• Clinical Noting and Terminology: Design Groundwork Exploration – Truncation of Clinical Terms addresses the problem that existing approaches to truncation may be more prone to misinterpretation and mis-selection than when terms are displayed in full. To inform future design decisions, the design exploration initiates an assessment of the patient safety risks associated with alternative approaches to truncation.

Updated Guidance Documents Approved as ISB Standards

We're pleased to announce that the following updated guidance documents have been approved as standards for the National Health Service (NHS) in England by the Information Standards Board for Health and Social Care (ISB):

• Address Input and Display
• Date and Time Input
• Date Display
• Patient Banner
• Patient Identification Number Input and Display
• Patient Name Input and Display
• Sex and Current Gender Input and Display
• Telephone Number Input and Display
• Time Display

Further Updates and Extensions to Existing Guidance

We've updated the following guidance documents:

• Medications: Design Guidance – Drug Administration provides guidance and recommendations for displaying a patient's medication administration information in clinical applications. The guidance enables unambiguous display of administration information, while enhancing patient safety and clinical application usability.
• Medications: Design Guidance – Search and Prescribe provides guidance and recommendations for the design of solutions to support searching for, and prescribing, individual medications for a patient. The guidance follows a Prescribing Model that is designed to minimize the risk when prescribing (or 'ordering') medications in hospital and acute care. This guidance document is the culmination of several releases of research and design exploration activity, resulting in one of the most wide-ranging guidance documents produced to date.

New Controls

We've released the following new controls:

• SearchAndPrescribe – This control allows designers and developers to implement a subset of prescribing functionality.
• Timeline – This control provides a mechanism to view and compare single events and items of duration against time. The control could be used to convey information either to the patient or to the clinician.

Coming Soon

Clinical Documentation Solution Accelerator

We're working on a solution accelerator that will enable you to create clinically encoded documents (such as Discharge Summaries or Referrals) using Microsoft Office Word. We'll be first presenting this at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) event to be held in Atlanta, USA in March 2010. Soon afterwards, we'll offer the code for download from MSCUI.net.

We hope you enjoy using our new features. Please provide feedback to mscui@microsoft.com or on our CodePlex Discussion Boards.