For the last couple of years I've been working in a team collaborating with the UK National Health Service (NHS). We've worked extensively with patient safety experts, clinicians, user interface designers, ISVs and representatives from the NHS' IT agency - Connecting for Health.

The purpose of this work? To produce a set of ASP.NET AJAX and Winforms controls together with some associated guidance that attempts to standardize clinical user interfaces. The guidance is designed to be platform agnostic so that it can be used in a broad range of environments. Whereas the controls embody the guidance using the Microsoft platform.

Two years ago the work started out as some early prototypes, preliminary guidance and some embryonic ASP.NET 2.0 Beta 2 controls. While the guidance work progressed we spun up a parallel track of work to develop a Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) Demonstrator. This had many purposes that included engaging ISVs, providing a visionary look at future clinical user interfaces and demonstrating the capabilities of Microsoft's emerging UI platform.

While the Demonstrator proved to be very successful in raising the profile of the work we were doing it was clear that ISVs had a more immediate need for controls they could use in their current generation of applications. For this reason we've spent the last 6 months producing a set of ASP.NET AJAX based controls that lean heavily on the functionality provided by the AJAX Control Toolkit. They come complete with SDK style documentation that integrates into the Visual Studio help collection.

Until very recently much of this work has remained between Microsoft, the NHS and selected ISVs. However recently, with the encouragement of Microsoft Corporate Healthcare, much of the work has been published publicly at http://www.mscui.net. A large part of the guidance produced to date is available for download as well as the associated controls along with their source code.

We're starting to see some discussion now in the wider community and I'd encourage anyone with an interest in improving patient safety via a common user interface to participate in the discussions forums.

The work will continue now and is planned for at least another 18 months. We'll continue to work with our partners and listen to the community as we strive to work towards better, more consistent and safer clinical user interfaces.