Several Millennium® users I’ve talked with since the first of the year have had problems in production after taking new service packages. All had the same question for me: “How could we have anticipated the problems we now have in production?” Because some of the problems involved a new solution being brought up, I had a question for them: “What is your compliance percentage on the System Compliance and Solution Compliance tabs of the Lights On Network?” Either they didn’t know what I was talking about or they only had the tabs enabled for production. In their ignorance, they were missing out on key data from Cerner and its clients that could have helped them prevent the issues they were experiencing.
New code undergoes several quality checks before Cerner releases it to its client base. However, internal testing can never be rigorous enough to anticipate the varied and complicated production environment. So several years ago the Lights On Network was set up to allow clients to see several aspects of their configuration. The two most useful, from my perspective, are the System Compliance and Solution Compliance tabs.
The System Compliance has four dials: Known Errors, Oracle Configuration, OS Configuration and HNAM Configuration.
- Known Errors shows quality issues, sometimes called CIRB, as well as CernerWorks Process Improvement (CWXPI) corrections. Essentially, when one or more clients have a problem in a production environment or a potential for a problem in production, notifications are sent out to alert all clients of potential issues (CIRB). The CWXPI items are problems found at sites that Cerner manages or hosts, and to improve all Millennium environments, Cerner publishes how its teams corrected these issues.
- Oracle Configuration shows clients what several basic Oracle configurations should be when they first go live. There may be reasons your configuration differs from the recommendations. These reasons or differences can be documented in the Inactivate selection from this screen, an option available on all four of these dials.
- OS Configuration shows what basic Operating System configurations should be. It’s a very good baseline. If you deviate from it, you need to be certain why.
- HNAM Configuration shows more CWXPI items, basic logging settings and some solution/application configurations. Generally, this tab focuses on technical aspects of the Millennium environments.
The application side of the fence is found in the Solution Compliance tab. This tab shows topics such as what Ops Jobs (Millennium batch scheduling) need to be run and recommendations on how to configure Ops Jobs if they are not being run. The tab provides feedback on a subset of the Millennium purges. These purges delete temporary data that is not considered part of the permanent patient record. It helps control the size of the Oracle database and can improve or stabilize performance.
Prognosis: Once you and your organization are aware of the quality checks available on the System Compliance and Solution Compliance tabs of Cerner’s Lights On Network, you can put processes in place to leverage this service so that you reduce problems in your Millennium domains and improve the effectiveness of your infrastructure.