Softek Solutions, Inc. News

Softek Solutions Inc., exhibiting in booth 2648 at RSNA 2011, has signed an agreement with five Kaiser Permanente Northern California hospitals for radiologists and clinicians to use Softek Illuminate.

Illuminate’s free–text search, notification and analytics technology gives users split–second access to the wealth of unstructured data locked in their system, along with the business intelligence needed to make faster, more informed clinical and business decisions.

Illuminate is now in use at Kaiser Permanente San Francisco, Roseville, Sacramento, Walnut Creek and South Sacramento medical centers. The Permanente Medical Group, formed more than 60 years ago, is the largest managed care organization in the United States. Kaiser’s EMR system, HealthConnect, is the largest private–sector EMR in the world, and its integrated healthcare delivery model includes more than 7,000 physicians practicing at 36 hospitals. Twenty–four Kaiser hospitals, including all Illuminate sites, have received the highest award (the Stage 7 Award) from HIMSS Analytics for their level of EMR implementation.

“Kaiser is on the forefront of healthcare IT development, and we are confident that Illuminate’s integration into their radiologists’ workflow will lead to better patient care,” said Softek CEO Matt McLenon.

Illuminate’s proprietary free–text search capability lets users search across multiple data sources and retrieve, at a minimum, radiology, pathology and laboratory reports in a matter of seconds. Users can search widely by diagnosis or condition, or they can narrow a search to a desired demographic or specific person. A patent–pending algorithm ensures that the most relevant results are listed first. Illuminate Analytics^™, powered by this search capability, accesses the electronic medical data and turns it into actionable business intelligence. Illuminate ActKnowledge^™ facilitates the communication and documentation of critical, urgent and incidental findings.

Softek Illuminate^® has signed its first two international clients, the Regional University Hospital (CHRU) of Lille, France, and St. Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney, Australia. The agreements, made through Philips Global Sales and Service, call for Illuminate to be installed on the hospitals’ Philips iSite PACS and will give radiologists instant access to the wealth of unstructured data locked in their system.

“Illuminate gives radiologists and administrators a full picture of their patients and practice — from individual patient history and follow–up to current trends in demographics, ordering, diseases and quality issues,” said Matt McLenon, CEO of Softek Solutions Inc., which manufactures Illuminate. “We are excited to bring this technology to two hospitals across the world from each other that are dedicated to improving patient care and business practices in a measurable way.”

Illuminate was deployed at St. Vincent’s in early September and is scheduled to begin at CHRU in early November.

CHRU is the only teaching hospital in the Nord–pas–de–Calais region of Northern France and is part of the largest hospital system in Western Europe, with nearly 4,000 physicians on staff. CHRU is a leader in both patient care and technology innovation. Care specialties include cancer treatment and research, pediatrics, cardiology and trauma. Both medical and technology students work with researchers in the healthcare engineering/IT lab to develop healthcare IT solutions.

St. Vincent’s, founded more than 150 years ago by the Sisters of Charity, is one of the largest not–for–profit healthcare providers in Australia. The academic hospital just outside Sydney’s central business district is a recognized trauma center and known for its cardiology, pulmonary, cancer and HIV/AIDS treatment specialties, among others. It was the first hospital in Australia to perform a successful heart transplant and to treat patients with HIV/AIDS.

Illuminate’s proprietary free–text search capability lets users retrieve radiology reports and images in a matter of seconds. Users can search widely by diagnosis or condition, or they can use advanced criteria to narrow a search to a desired demographic or specific person. A patent–pending algorithm ensures that the most relevant results are listed first. Illuminate Analytics, powered by this search capability, accesses the electronic medical data and turns it into actionable business intelligence.

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.

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.

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.

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.