Welcome to the first of our posts on real-world solutions for maximizing the performance of your Cerner Millennium system. Not wanting to mislead you, I’ll disclose up front that I am not a physician, nor is anyone else on our team. We have, however, been doctoring Millennium for many years – me for the past 11 – and the idea that the system might need probing in key places rings true to our experiences. Whether you simply need a checkup to keep Millennium running at peak performance or are desperate for a life-saving transplant, we’re hoping this new blog will offer lots of practical insight.
I’ve worked as a Millennium system implementer over the years for Cerner, Millennium clients and now Panther manufacturer Softek Solutions. I love figuring out how to get multiple systems to talk together as quickly and reliably as possibly. I also know how complex Millennium is and how underfunded and overextended hospital IT staffs can be. Most lack the time and resources they need to devote to understanding all of Millennium’s intricacies. Not surprisingly, some performance issues are common to many sites.
This blog will address those commonalities and hopefully will help you get Millennium running more reliably and faster (with fewer latencies). For instance, in the coming weeks we will relate stories from Millennium clients that reflect common experiences as well as give practical how-to’s in such areas as tuning basics, chart format consistency, easy script analysis and enterprise integration, to name a few.
The beauty of this blog is that it reaches many Millennium clients all at once. It also allows the conversation to continue beyond our postings. Rather than the Softek team answering everyone’s questions – as fun as that would be – we’re hoping that collaboration develops among all of you, which everyone will find valuable.
That said, we want to set a few ground rules, both for us and for you. While we believe that Softek Panther would make life better for all Millennium clients – for the past seven years, it has offered intuitive management, accurate monitoring and actionable notifications for Millennium – this blog will focus on fine-tuning Millennium, not touting Panther. For your part, we ask that you confine your comments to solving the problem at hand, not bashing any company or person. We’re confident we’ll discover that a respectful, robust conversation will lead to robust system performance. So I invite you to tune in during the coming weeks to learn how to maximize Millennium.