Patient Safety

Patient Safety Principles

Patient safety is a top priority within the global healthcare industry and is paramount to all design and development of Microsoft Health CUI Design Guidance and Toolkit controls. This is assured through the use of a set of Patient Safety Principles, which are also of importance to organizations, such as the World Health Organization (WHO) and the National Patient Safety Agency (NPSA).

Evidence of User Research

Microsoft Health CUI is committed to helping healthcare providers improve patient safety and increase clinical productivity. This is achieved through a program of user research that includes a variety of structured activities involving clinicians, patient safety experts, and other potential end-users.

"The Microsoft Health CUI is a key building block to increasing application time-to-market, clinician productivity and increasing patient safety across the healthcare industry"

Roger Killen, Managing Director - The Learning Clinic

The following are examples of how clinical and software providers are involved in the Microsoft Health CUI research activities:

Task

Objective

Healthcare Providers	The review, refinement and validation of the Microsoft Health CUI project personas	To ensure that the personas' core tasks, issues, and needs to complete their work-related goals have been accurately identified
	The assessment of pre-implemented guidance using demonstrators and wireframes	To ensure that the guidance covers the needs and wants of the end-users, and to capture conceptual and usage challenges in time to enable revisions of the guidance prior to publication
	The assessment of prototypes of the Design Guidance and Toolkit controls	To ensure that all guideline and control implementation prototypes are aligned with expert assessments of their in-context usability
	Assessment of Design Guidance implementations	To ensure all Design Guidance and Toolkit controls are informed by existing specialist knowledge of clinical work practice and related user interface design principles
Software Providers	Evaluation of Design Guidance and Toolkit controls as support to building applications	To build up a body of in-house expertise on how different user interface implementations support or undermine patient safety, and the strengths and weaknesses of ISV applications for supporting core end-user tasks

If you are a healthcare professional and would like to be involved in Microsoft Health CUI research activities, please visit NHS Connecting for Health - Events Online.

Healthcare Authorities

Where applicable at feature level, the Microsoft Health CUI Design Guidance and supporting Toolkit controls adhere to the guidelines defined by the following leading authorities in patient safety:

• The World Health Organization (WHO) - provides patient safety solutions for the identification and re-design of care processes for the prevention of human error reaching patients
• National Patient Safety Agency (NPSA) - provides a compendium of advice, alerts and best guidance practice relating to patient safety

Delivery Lifecycle

An effective, rigorous and iterative design and development process is used to create the Microsoft Health CUI Design Guidance and supporting Toolkit controls, involving patient safety risk assessments with a wide range of clinical and healthcare professionals throughout the process. The Delivery Lifecycle provides you with further insight into the activities that make up this process.