I have been fairly quiet for the last few months, and one of the reasons is that I have been working on a Silverlight 2 application, showcasing some future thinking for rich UI in the healthcare space.
The Microsoft Health Common User Interface: Patient Journey Demonstrator is the result of work from a very small team based here in the UK, and we think, is a great example of a Rich Internet Application demonstrating an LOB scenario, but using the power of Silverlight to provide beautiful, meaningful ways of representing incredibly complex data.
The blurb from the site...
‘The Microsoft Health Common User Interface (MSCUI) Patient Journey Demonstrator is a vehicle for Microsoft thought leadership in state-of-the-art User Experience for Healthcare applications. It provides exemplar implementations of Microsoft Common User Interface guidance on a Microsoft platform.
It is our showcase for new ideas, experimentation and an artefact for learning and thinking about future developments of the MSCUI program.’
The demonstrator is actually broken up into 3 separate applications, describing the ‘day-in-the-life’ of a patient from the perspective of a primary care administrator, a GP, and a registrar in a hospital. The UI is completely interactive and you are able to explore, manipulate, layer and scale the patient’s data to create rich visualisations.
Over the next couple of months, I want to blog about some of the things we have built here, how we did it, share snippets of code, and talk more about how we are developing it further.
Some of the cool things in Silverlight 2 that we are already using include (but are not limited to J)...
· Deep zoom to view complex ECG (electrocardiogram) data
· Intelligent, scaling layout
· Data-binding everywhere
· Animation and media
· Vector graphics enabling real time manipulation of chart data
A video covering some of this is in the pipeline, so watch this space!
Big thanks to the team invloved in building this...
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Kirsten Disse - lead UX designer
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Sergei Golubev - Silverlight UI developer
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Joe Wardell - Silverlight UI developer
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Neil Ashley & Tinisha Rocca - visual designers
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Alam Rahman - lead test
In the mean time, head over to the site and please share any feedback / ideas either here or on our CodePlex discussion board here.
Martin
NOTE FOR USERS OUTSIDE OF THE UK:-
A few users outside of the UK are experience a bug with the Primary Care and Secondary Care demonstrators. The symptom is when they try to launch the either of these demonstrators, they see our default error dialogue stating: "This application has encountered a problem and needs to close. Please, try restarting it. Sorry for any inconvenience."
We have identified that the problem is due to current 'Regional and Language' settings. The reason is because we do various things with the formatting of dates, but have only extensively tested with the UK date format. We have now logged the issue and are aiming to release the demonstrator with the fix when Silverlight 2 Beta 2 ships.
There is a workaround though in the meantime. You can access the second parts of the demonstrator by changing you current language format to 'English (United Kingdom)'. You can access this in Windows Vista via...
Control Panel -> Regional and Langauge Options -> Formats (tab) and selecting 'English (United Kingdom)' from the drop-down.
Many thanks again, and please keep the feedback coming.