With the significant impact on hospital finances and resources, many organizations are asking in what ways can we improve our clinicians’ delivery of care, without incurring huge operational or capital expenditures? One method to make no-cost improvements is to ensure the correct number of processes are running on each Millennium™ application node.
The normal metrics used to identify “performance” of applications tend to evaluate how much CPU and memory are being used, for example. However, these metrics are not effective for tracking the performance of an application node’s throughput. CPU and Memory usage are effective metrics to track resource consumption and the overall scalability of the application node. The essential problem is that these metrics are designed to provide a high-level overview of the amount of work being done by the application node. They are not designed to track the throughput of an individual process or a set of processes on each application node.
The question that may be raised is, “How do you appropriately measure the output of a Millennium ‘service’”? A service is a set of processes that work together to accomplish the same set of tasks or requests. For example, there is a process named CPM Async Script that has multiple “instances” that are configured to run and are running. This is done to handle the amount of work being done by the processes. Tracking and instrumenting these processes would be a simple process. The complexity lies in the lack of tools to track this.
Softek Panther has the tools to track and measure these throughputs. Panther’s SCP Recommendations control shows how many additional instances of a given process are needed to keep up with the current version of code, the current application build, and the current clinical volumes.
An example of SCP Recommendations control:
Selecting the box in the Selected column will change the number of configured instances in the Increase column. For example, the first row; Queue, CERN.EKS_ASYNCH_01; Entry ID, 150; SCP Description, Discern Expert Server (EKS_ASYNCH_01); currently has a configured instance count of 31, but it needs to have 1 more instance added (to each application node) to be configured and started to better handle throughput. If Panther has the privileges set up to make fixes, the SCP Recommendations control will apply the increase of instances across all application nodes in the domain. Panther will not start additional instances until the server is cycled by the end user.
Using the SCP Recommendations Control every week and making the recommended changes will keep the Millennium system working with the highest clinical throughput that the application nodes can achieve. These recommendations are achieved without adding hardware, taking new Millennium versions, or paying for consultants to perform costly, time-consuming analysis.
Increasing the number of instances on your application nodes is a very effective and inexpensive way to keep your clinicians happy with the performance of Millennium. Using the SCP Recommendations control can help ensure that your system is running effectively, even as workloads increase.
What does Softek® do?
Softek’s mission is to help hospital systems maximize their investment in their Oracle Health EHRs. We do this by providing innovative software solutions and consulting services that can achieve more together than either can alone.
At Softek, our team of innovators and software developers brings expertise beyond the ordinary to every client. Our experts are involved with Oracle Health EHR hospitals throughout the country, consulting clients so they can optimize system performance and revenue integrity.
Softek delivers a full suite of consulting services and software solutions to assess and optimize EMR system performance, including revenue cycle integrity and patient accounting.
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