Photos: First look at Microsoft's NHS software

Microsoft will spend a total of £40m - just over one per cent of its £3.4bn annual development budget - on the CUI, for which the company solicited advice and information from around 180 clinicians.

The interface presents a variety of information in many different ways. Pictured is an X-ray of a bunion on the top half of the screen and on the lower half there are a selection of 'care pathways'.

The care pathways are basically segmented to-do lists reminding the clinician to take the patient's blood pressure, heart rate, send the X-ray to a foot specialist and so on.

The clinicians can bypass any steps they feel are unnecessary. Susan Brown, Microsoft's user experience program manager, said: "The expert will make the decisions, not the interface".

The software behemoth is still trying to decide how to present so much complex information to the user. Kirby said this is hard to do because clinicians want all the information they have available in one go.

Photo credit: Microsoft