Softek OnTrack News

The vehicle of information technology is taking your hospital down an exciting road, with Softek Panther’s monitoring and management technology guiding you to your destination. Softek is excited to announce an expanded suite of independent, expert assessments to keep your Cerner Millennium^® system on track to deliver your core health mission through IT. Softek OnTrack^™ is our new branding that encompasses Panther and our Extended Services along with new services that continue to grow out of our Millennium expertise.

Powered by our Panther technology and the knowledge of Softek’s Millennium experts, OnTrack is a framework for turning data into evidence-based, actionable intelligence for management, IT and remote-hosting providers. OnTrack brings independent, objective visibility to your Cerner Millennium system and provides both the medium and the standard for judging how system operations actually impact clinicians at the point-of-care.

Some of our clients have already experienced the benefit of services delivered under OnTrack by engaging in our auditing services. To date, our analysts have performed audits for more than 40 clients and uncovered scores of issues related to patient care, business operations and performance delivery. Common discoveries included:

• Clinical information that never made it to the patient record
• Lost charges
• Queuing backlogs
• Slowdowns because of data that needed to be purged or defragmented

To address these issues, the audit, among other things, identifies:

• The exact scripts for analysts to fix, which eliminates hours of hunting to find the problem
• What queues are backing up, the extent of the backlog and how to fix them quickly in an uptime manner
• Best practices to implement to purge unnecessary data and defragment extents in an uptime manner, which will speed up the system and cut costs for space usage

Our Discovery Audit performs more than 500 tests to determine clinical and financial risks, bottlenecks both inside Millennium and with external sources, and configuration consistency and stability. Our Queuing Performance Spreadsheet delivers weekly reports of backlogs in your system. To learn more about OnTrack Extended Services, contact us.

Many of the enhancements added to Panther over the years have been the result of your suggestions. While we love talking with you directly, we also want to encourage you to use our Customer Feedback forum at https://feedback.softekinc.com. First-time users of the forum will need to set up an account, so we’ve put together a short instruction sheet to tell you how (www.softekinc.com/ontrack/feedback.php).

Once you set up your account, you will be able to suggest updates to Panther, see suggestions made by other Panther clients and see the status of the various suggestions. Forum users are given a total of 10 votes to cast for their ideas, with the ability to cast up to three votes for any single suggestion.

We want to make sure our engineers focus their energies on the enhancements you need most. The traditional means of filing an enhancement idea through the Panther Support website is still available, but we encourage you to use the Feedback forum so you can see what others are saying and to bring a collective voice to adding value to Panther.

Panther clients continue to be cited for their high quality of care and degree of interoperability. Here is a sampling of recent honorees:

• Among the 100 top U.S. hospitals identified by Thomson Reuters for their overall organizational performance are Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago (major teaching hospitals), Memorial Hermann Medical Center in Houston (large community hospitals) and Memorial Hermann Hospital in Katy, TX (medium community hospitals). Thomson Reuters analyzed a variety of Medicare and patient satisfaction data for nearly 3,000 hospitals.
• Thomson Reuters also evaluates inpatient cardiovascular services. Among the 50 top cardiovascular hospitals chosen from 1,000 U.S. hospitals are Baystate Hospital in Springfield, MA; and Genesis Medical Center East in Davenport, IA.
• The Leapfrog Group has named 65 top hospitals based on its survey of patient safety and quality measurements. Among the honorees are 16 Kaiser Permanente medical centers in California and Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, MA.
• Three Panther clients were honored by Health Imaging & IT magazine in 2010 as Top 25 Connected Facilities for their ability to share patient data and images internally and/or externally. The winners were Banner Health in Phoenix, AZ; Carolinas HealthCare System in Charlotte, NC; and WellSpan Health in York, PA.

We want to congratulate these clients on their accomplishments.

We’d like to welcome three new organizations to the Panther family: MedStar Health in Baltimore, MD; North Kansas City Hospital, in North Kansas City, MO; and Alberta Health Services (AHS) in Alberta, Canada. The not-for-profit MedStar is a remote-hosted organization (RHO) and is the largest health system in the Baltimore/Washington, DC, region. Its nine hospitals are serviced by 5,300 physicians and 26,000 associates. North Kansas City’s 451-bed facility, also an RHO, was Cerner’s second EMR client. Its campus includes outpatient services, medical offices, home health services and hospice services. Based in Calgary, AHS is a province-wide organization and the largest provider of healthcare in Canada with about 90,000 associates and physicians. North Kansas City and AHS have also signed up for Softek’s independent auditing services of their Cerner systems.

A Panther facility in Texas is currently caring for U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, who was shot in the head Jan. 8 while speaking to constituents. She has begun her extensive rehab at TIRR Memorial Hermann (The Institute for Rehabilitation and Research) in Houston. TIRR Memorial Hermann is consistently recognized as one of the top hospitals in the country for treating traumatic brain injuries. Rep. Giffords was one of 19 victims shot outside a Tucson, AZ, grocery store. Six of the shooting victims died.