NHS Summary Care Record

Bringing consistency and harmony to UK national medical records

The National Health Service in the UK had been on a long term path to implement nationwide patient records, giving UK clinicians conditional access to citizen health records. At the same time, Microsoft and the NHS were involved in a shared IP project, the Microsoft Common User Interface programme which sought to bring UI consistency, safety and accessibility to clinical interfaces across the UK.

This project was to be the first time the MSCUI guidance would be applied to the NHS national programme.

PROBLEM

Business challenge: Extremely high profile and politically sensitive programme, involving vast numbers of people from different organisations and business domains including Clinical, technical and information governance which required tact, diplomacy, strategy and tenacity in engagement. The implementation was a government mandate and the design needed to play an important role in embedding credibility of the overall programme, which had been running for several years prior.
Technical challenge: Many technical considerations in implementation of national scale. The app had to draw on disparate data sources and operate within different security environments. Understanding and designing for opportunities and limitations of technical implementation was a big part of the challenge.
Human challenge: We needed to bring consistency and harmony to the end user experience and ensure app met clinical safety standards and WCAG accessibility guidelines

PROCESS

To begin with, I needed to understand the breadth of 30+ items of CUI guidance, establish what was relevant and apply to this instance. This involved super-fast assimilation and research alongside adherence to, or challenging business rules, collaboration and cooperation with a number of other UI and Clinical experts attached to the programme and wider teams at Microsoft, stakeholders at the NHS, technical expert teams & organisations and the build partner, BT all within aggressive time frames and with shifting priorities. We often described this project as "building an aeroplane while in mid-flight!" Additionally there had been no end-to-end UX design prior to my joining the project. Establishing shared vision for app functionality through database and information flow diagrams, overall application maps and interaction sketches brought alignment and real life to the project. The design process played a powerful role in unifying diverse groups and making concepts tangible. Also implemented a clean and modern UI which gave the project a high quality and reliable feel while assuring the UI met Accessibility guidelines.

ROLE: Lead UX Consultant, working very closely with a programme manager / BA from Microsoft, project team including clinical stakeholders from NHS & BT and as scope grew, oversaw 3 other external UX consultants.

OUTCOME

After the design work was validated through Design Steering Groups, Clinical Safety and Implementation partners, which I also managed, my final role was to provide 'pixel-perfect' UI flats and a style guide to the build partner (BT). I then took on a review and assurance role through the build specification process. Build: Traditional waterfall. Implementation partner offshored build work.

This project has had significant impact. In July 2014, the SCR reached 40M patient records, and 19,000 Clinician Views per week.

My work was well received by the NHS and inspired further functional extensions of the application which I led for subsequent phases.