Silverlight, WPF and the Presentation of Healthcare Information

A lot has happened since the 1980's and Healthcare has sure seen its share of promises of data presentation and user interface evolution. Not just from the perspective of how information is fitted to and displayed on a user's screen, but more challenging applications such as how many different devices can display (and effectively convey) the same information and convey that information either at the patient's bedside in the hospital, in the waiting room of a doctor's office, on a physician's mobile phone or in the patient's home.

These are not new challenges by any means, but they represent a key obstacle faced by application developers who target the healthcare industry as healthcare applications are required to reach patients and consumers in a variety of different care delivery settings.

There may be some relief on the horizon. More and more there are reports of healthcare-specific user interface innovation through the use of Microsoft Silverlight. For the record, Microsoft® Silverlight™ is a cross-browser, cross-platform, and cross-device plug-in for delivering the next generation of media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web - just what the doctor ordered for healthcare applications of the future.

One example is Epic Systems.

Epic, an enterprise-class vendor for healthcare providers serving approximately 15 percent or more of the U.S. population, has elected to migrate its windows-based client application with more than 6 million lines of code to the .NET and Silverlight client platform.  Epic’s decision was driven by the ease and productivity of web development with the Microsoft platform.

I had the opportunity to speak with Epic Senior Development Manager Erv Walter during his recent visit to the Redmond campus and I asked him to tell me more about Epic's decision:

“A key factor in our decision to proceed with the migration of our Hyperspace Client from the current Microsoft Win32 development platform to the new Microsoft web based client development platform was the substantial progress with Silverlight.   Silverlight, in combination with ASP.NET, will allow our developers to master a single skill set in a development environment which can be leveraged across the development spectrum from basic web applications to Rich Internet Applications.”

What's most exciting is not just how we can solve the problems of yesterday, but the exponential growth of new and innovative user interfaces that will be delivered tomorrow and beyond. For more information on Microsoft’s healthcare strategy, visit www.microsoft.com/healthcare.

Keith Cox, Director, Global ISVs